Quintillion to Repair Broken Arctic Fiber Line After Six-Month Delay
Repairs begin, but plan for terrestrial backup network remains on ice
WASHINGTON, July 14, 2025 – It’s been six months, but a damaged Alaskan fiber cable may soon be back online.
Quintillion President Michael McHale announced Friday that the company will dispatch vessels this July to repair an undersea cable line severed by Arctic ice in January. The internet-service provider had to postpone repairs until summer because of Arctic conditions and thick sea ice surrounding the line. The repairs were anticipated to take several weeks to complete.
The January outage affected several communities in the North Slope and Northwest Arctic Boroughs. These two boroughs are the northernmost county or county equivalents in the U.S., with a combined land area more than three times that of Virginia and a population less than one-third that of Cheyenne, Wyoming.
This was not the first time a single cable break has disrupted Alaska’s internet connections. In June 2023, sea ice snapped a Quintillion cable 34 miles offshore of the North Slope, leaving many of the same areas without service. That break took three months to repair.
To address these vulnerabilities, Quintillion was awarded an $88.9 million grant in June 2023 from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s Enabling Middle Mile Broadband Infrastructure Program. The company planned to use that grant, in addition to $61 million from its own coffers, to build a fiber beltway around the state that would have allowed the network to operate even in the instance of a subsea cable break.
An article detailing the company’s plans to begin construction on the network this summer was published just four days before this latest cable break. As of this writing, Quintillion has yet to lay a single mile of the network.
In the months following the January outage, Quintillion floated the idea of building a terrestrial fiber route to restore broadband service in the spring while it waited for the repair window to open. In late February, the company announced that it had completed most of the permits required to start the project, and urged the Federal Emergency Management Agency to rapidly approve work.
“The window for a winter build is closing rapidly, so Quintillion will need decisive action from FEMA in the next week to allow for land bridge construction this spring,” the company said in a release.
Evidently, that action never came, as the company was still awaiting approval from the agency in late March. It has not mentioned the terrestrial project as part of its outage updates since mid-April.
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