By Anna Lionas

Repairs to the broken Quintillion fiberoptic cable in the Beaufort Sea are on the horizon, seven months after the cut caused widespread internet outages in western and northern Alaska, according to Quintillion’s President Mac McHale. 
“We’ve had, obviously, a good amount of time to really, really plan and organize around this repair in terms of vessels and tools and crews and various different approaches and options,” McHale told the Nugget.
On January 18, communities across the state were cut off from internet after the subsea fiberoptic cable that runs from Prudhoe Bay to Nome was damaged under the sea ice, approximately 30 miles north of Oliktok Point.
Due to lingering sea ice, repairs are not possible until late summer, early fall. In the meantime, businesses and private customers as well as telecommunications companies have adapted to different ways to connect to the internet during the ongoing outage and the customer base moved on from what claims to be more resilient internet options.
This is the third Quintillion cable break in two years and the second one that left thousands without internet for a long period of time.

Mobilization
McHale defines the current stage of repairs as the mobilization process. Two vessels are currently in Vancouver, one will make the repairs on the cable, the other will retrieve it from and bury it again in the seafloor.
The repair vessel is headed to Dutch Harbor to pick up supplies, people and tools for the repair. Both boats will head up to the Beaufort Sea and ‘stage’ themselves at Wainwright until the sea ice retreats and ships can travel. According to the current sea ice forecast they should arrive at the break site the second week of August.
After that it’s unclear how long it will take to repair the cable this time around. When the cable broke in 2023, repairs took a month longer than anticipated.
“You’re essentially at the mercy of ice-free waters,” McHale said.
The first step once the repair crew reaches the area is to locate the cable. For this they’ll use remote operating vehicles that go underwater with high resolution cameras. Dive teams will also be deployed.
The seaside end and the shoreside ends of the cable will be pulled aboard the ship, stripped of the damage, spliced and reconnected. Then the cable will be placed back under the seafloor, but this time with a different method than used in the 2023 cable break.
McHale also said rock bags will be deployed to each of the “transition points” where the cable is more likely to lift above the seafloor or move.

Not the first time
In June of 2023 an ice scour occurred near the same location off Oliktok Point and resulted in an outage for over three months. Another outage in April of 2024 happened after portion of the fiber optic cable on land was damaged and affected internet and cellular connection for about 12 hours.
In both the 2023 outage and the current one the two main telecommunications companies in the Bering Strait Region, GCI and Fastwyre (formerly Telalaska) struggled to provide service at the same level. Both issued credits to internet customers for months and promised improved internet quality as they slowly switched over to satellite internet options.
GCI and Fastwyre both began to incorporate backup satellite terrestrial internet/phone systems. According to GCI spokesperson Megan Webb, after months of boosting their backup systems, all GCI users in Nome and Utqiagvik are back to full service, completely independent from the fiberoptic cable.
But internet connection was spotty for many for a while, and phone lines were down. Manager of Munaqsri Senior Apartments LeeAnn Hoogendorn said the office was without phone, internet and fax service for three months.
“We ended up having to get Starlink in March, but prior to March we were personal hot-spotting off our cellphones just to do day-to-day work,” Hoogendorn said.
They ended up switching back to Fastwyre services after they boosted their system, but operations were difficult for months.
Munaqsri is one of many entities in town that made the switch over to satellite internet provider Starlink. After the first Quintillion fiberoptic cable outage in 2023, the small satellite dishes started popping up around town. This proved useful when the second break occurred as those on Starlink maintained their internet.
Businesses like the Nome Courthouse, Northrim Bank, Alaska Commercial Company and Sitnasuak Native Corporation all switched to satellite internet after the first break.
The City of Nome joined the ranks of Starlink users later this year after months of issues. The outage halted email and phone communication from the city office, police department, museum, library and utility. Now the City has Starlink as a backup to GCI.
Two large cable breaks have made Nome think differently about resiliency of communications. For many, Starlink seems like the inevitable solution. However, last week on July 24, a chink in the space-based armor was revealed when the company experienced an international outage that lasted almost three hours.
Once again Nome was hit with an outage, and those with other telecommunications providers fared better. Nome Joint Utility experienced issues for days after the Starlink outage, trying to reconnect computers.
“When we lost the internet we lost our remote computers and some of our phones,” Manager of the Utility John Handeland said. “It messed a bunch of our systems up.”

Starlink’s Vice President of Engineering Michael Nicolls posted on social media that the outage was due to a failure of “key internal software services that operate the core network.”
“We apologize for the temporary disruption in our service; we are deeply committed to providing a highly reliable network, and will fully root cause this issue and ensure it does not occur again.” Nicolls wrote.

Other plans
Quintillion recognizes there is much to be done to make their system more resilient to cable breaks.
“Mother Nature is a strong force, and you know, it’s happened twice, so we have to make sure that we’re doing everything possible to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” McHale said.
This includes two redundancy projects they’ve been eyeing for a while.
The first is a proposed terrestrial cable route from Utqiagvik to Prudhoe Bay. This will create a ring on the North Slope that is “self-healing” so if there’s a cut in the water the terrestrial fiber will reroute it and restore connection.
Quintillion has also been working on the Nome to Homer express project which would create a fiberoptic ring around Alaska. This is set to be complete at the end of 2026 and be live in 2027.
“That is to make sure that when lightning strikes or iceberg strikes or parachutes through the cable, or whatever happens in this remote, austere environment that our network will self-yield and continue to provide services,” McHale said.
As far as the terrestrial route to Prudhoe Bay goes, up until a few months ago Quintillion was counting on federal funding to pull it off.
But the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, shut down its BRIC grant program on April 8. BRIC, short for Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities was a pre-disaster mitigation program.
“Although we were in pre-award stage, that never came to fruition,” McHale said.
Quintillion has since pivoted and on July 2 applied for another federal infrastructure grant through the Defense Community Infrastructure Program.
First things first, though, the cable needs to be repaired.
“As soon as it’s safe to enter the area, we will. We have all the right tools, the right crews, everybody knows what the drill is. There’s experience from the last episode, two years ago, and we utilize all that to the best advantage and get this thing done efficiently, effectively and move on to the second layer and third layer of redundancy,” McHale said.