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Quintillion Provides Subsea Fiber Cut Updates

Company hopes to have new fiber route completed by this spring.

Quintillion Provides Subsea Fiber Cut Updates
Photo of Quintillion President Mac McHale (in middle) with coworkers, from company's website

WASHINGTON, Jan. 30, 2025 – The location of a subsea fiber cut that has left large parts of Northwest Alaska without Internet access or with degraded access for weeks has been discovered.

Telecommunications company Quintillion released more information about a its subsea fiber cable that snapped on Jan. 18, causing widespread outages in Alaska. According to experts, an ice scour caused by fast moving sea ice resulted in the severing of a fiber cable around 32-37 miles north of Olitok Point in Northern Alaska on the Beaufort Sea.

An ice scour occurs when the bottom of a large glacier scrapes across a seabed when drifting, which often causes a disruption or breaking of sentiments on the sea ground.

Location of subsea fiber cut and proposed workaround. Source: Quintillion

Quintillion President Mac McHale says that the company has long-term plans to fix and reroute the subsea cable. However, due to the length of those repairs it will build a terrestrial fiber route in the meantime that will get customers back online by the middle of the spring. 

McHale believes that “there is moderate probability of success” in getting these communities high-speed Internet in this time frame due to “challenges beyond Quntillion’s control, including the permitting process being slowed by federal government rules/regulations.”

McHale and other stakeholders are urging the federal government to award a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) grant within the next few weeks to help expedite this building process. A FEMA application was initiated by Quintillion back in July 2023, but is still in the pre-award phase.

Quintillion is owned by Grain Management, a private equity firm in Washington, D.C.

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