Broadband or bust

Circle. Engines roaring, Annie pauses to steady its load, which had begun to sway below, and veers off toward a bald mountaintop. On the mountain, at a rocky site called Igichuk, a work crew has just finished setting up the tower’s base, dropped off earlier by Annie. Now, they’re focused on executing the most delicate delivery of the day, one of many difficult steps required to sink a single new telecommunications tower into the vast, roadless Alaskan tundra. When Annie arrives, the pilot carefully dangles the new section of tower above its base. Below, four crew members stand ready to guide it into position, strapped into harnesses with their feet braced against the base’s highest rung. Once the new section of tower is close enough, each crew member grabs a steel rope looped through one of its lowest joints and gently nudges the tower so that it is centered directly over the base. Within minutes, the section is lined up, its four metal feet perfectly aligned with the base’s corners. The crew works quickly to insert a single bolt into each leg; they’ll go back and add more later. When they give the sign, the pilot releases the tower from Annie’s grasp, and pulls away. The tower stands, now the highest point across the tundra, and sparkles in the midday sun. Once active, it will relay data north to several hundred miners at Red Dog, the world’s largest zinc mine, and back to a tower in Kotzebue, a city of 3,245 built on a thin lip of spongy land that bows out into the Chukchi Sea along the isolated western rim of Alaska. Here on the edge of the U.S. Arctic, Internet connectivity is a slow—and expensive—proposition. Eighty-one percent of rural residents in Alaska do not have broadband Internet, defined by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as providing a minimum download speed of 25 megabits per second. People in Kotzebue have long relied on satellite connections for Internet service at speeds comparable to those of dial-up. At the beginning of the year, their average download speed was just 2 Mb/s. The Igichuk tower is one of the final pieces of one of the most ambitious telecommunications projects in the rural United States. Built by General Communication Inc. (GCI) and known as TERRA, it was completed this past October, after US $300 million of investment and six years of construction, when engineers installed its final microwave repeater. The network uses a combination of repeater data links and fiber optics h u l k i n g o r a n g e h e l i c o p t e r n a m e d A n n i e h o i s t s a g l e a m i n g m e t a l t o w e r i n t o t h e s k y o n t h e o u t s k i r t s o f K o t z e b u e , a s m a l l A l a s k a n