[aklug] Re: Thank you, GCI

From: Christopher Howard <christopher.howard@frigidcode.com>
Date: Wed Nov 06 2013 - 08:34:16 AKST

On 11/06/2013 07:47 AM, Scott A. Johnson wrote:
> A bit off topic, but wanted to give a public shout out to GCI and its
> employees. They have their critics, and I used to be among them, but
> they do a lot of good as well. For any of your who have spent time in
> the Bush, you understand how difficult satellite latency can be to
> deal with for a techie. I live in Nome and during the maintenance
> window around 1:30 this morning, GCI moved Nome off of 1970s satellite
> “broadband" and into the 21st century with their microwave/fiber TERRA
> system. My latency to Anchorage just dropped from 600ms+ to 53ms. My
> throughput increased from ~2Mbit/256Kbit (on a GOOD day) to
> 6Mbit/2Mbit. It’s enough to make a techie cry. I can now video chat
> with family, actually watch online videos, and not feel like a third
> world citizen with load times of the simplest of web pages.
>
> Thank you, GCI.
>
> Scott

I thought I'd mention: Quintillion Network reps were running around UAF
campus yesterday doing PR meetings. Evidently by 2015 there will be a
new fiber line going from Europe to Asia, through the waters north of
Canada and Alaska. Apparently QN will be putting spurs into Nome and a
few other northern cities, and connecting all of those to Fairbanks by
another land fibre line. Provided, that is, there aren't any last minute
political issues that throw a wrench in the plans. View this page
<http://quintillionnetworks.com/network.php> and scroll about halfway
down the page to see a better map of what I'm talking about.

I'm definitely not a networking expert, but the reps seemed pretty
confident this would dramatically change bandwidth and pricing in
northern Alaska.

Interesting side note: A rep said that one of the main reasons for the
new subsea line is that other countries don't like to route this data
through the U.S, which is what many of them currently do. Evidently the
fact that the NSA reads and analyzes all incoming international data
really bothers a lot of the International community. (The current
alternative is to route the data through the middle east, which creates
other security problems.)
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Received on Wed Nov 6 08:33:29 2013

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