Recently, GCI and Quintillion announced their partnership to bring broadband to Kotzebue and Nome businesses, schools and health clinics. It was stated they may be able to bring broadband to those residents by the end of the year. Some of you may be wondering if it will be affordable or why other communities on the fiber weren t included? After all, Quintillion fiber does land in those communities and if the goal is to serve rural Alaskans, why not add all those residents immediately
The problem is that we spend a lot of money and we re expanding broadband at a snail s pace. Large fiber and microwave projects that extend into rural communities are primarily aimed at providing broadband to schools and health clinics, which are heavily subsidized by the federal government. These systems, when used for consumer broadband, result in the high prices that you see today.
Oil and gas industry fears Biden will halt key projects in Alaska February 5th |
President Joe Biden moved swiftly in his first days in office to suspend oil and gas drilling on federal lands, stirring concerns among Alaska leaders and drillers that key projects may be halted.
The new Democratic president s actions haven t yet appeared to cause long-term disruptions in Alaska, though an oil exploration project was delayed for more than a week.
While many Alaskans expect the state s existing oil fields to keep pumping oil, they say Biden s plans to retool the national economy to deal with climate change could have an outsized impact on Alaska and its heavy reliance on oil production.
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We re making this important information available without a subscription as a public service. But we depend on reader support to do this work. Please consider supporting independent journalism in Alaska, at just $1.99 for the first month of your subscription. A highly contagious strain of the novel coronavirus was recently detected in Alaska. According to experts, that means Alaskans should still be taking pandemic safety measures seriously especially if they weren’t already. To be sure, the new variant still spreads the same way as others usually through tiny respiratory droplets in the air but the strain, known as B.1.1.7 or the U.K. variant (because that’s where it was originally identified), may be much more contagious than the current, more common strain that’s circulating.
By DAVE KIFFER - With future ferry service up in the air and the price of both barge shipping and air travel on the rise, you could certainly forgive Ketchikan residents for wistfully wondering how life would be different in Southern Southeast if a road connected Ketchikan to the rest of the continent.
To be sure, even if there was a road it would be at least a 1,500-mile trip to drive from Ketchikan to Seattle but that s the not the point. You could do it, even if it took several days.
It was during the expansion of the canned salmon industry in the 1920s and early 1930s, that the federal government began considering connecting Alaska to the rest of the country. Thomas MacDonald, who would run the Bureau of Public Roads from 1919 to 1953, first proposed a coastal highway between Seattle and Southeast Alaska in 1925.
How the Washington Capitals weathered an early COVID-19 storm and are poised to be top Stanley Cup contenders
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Greg Wyshynski and Emily Kaplan make their early-season picks for NHL awards. (4:22)
It was inevitable that COVID-19 would impact the 2021 NHL season, but the Washington Capitals didn t imagine it would impact them so early or so hard.
After their first road trip to Buffalo and Pittsburgh, goalie Ilya Samsonov tested positive for the coronavirus. The NHL s contact tracing revealed the team s four Russian players (captain Alex Ovechkin, forward Evgeny Kuznetsov, defenseman Dmitry Orlov and Samsonov) spent time in the same hotel room, violating the NHL s strict road trip rules. The Capitals were fined $100,000, and the players were required to quarantine at least 10 days.