{"id":114952,"date":"2025-09-04T22:00:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-04T22:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/114952\/"},"modified":"2025-09-04T22:00:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-04T22:00:07","slug":"at-last-quintillion-completes-arctic-cable-repair","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/114952\/","title":{"rendered":"At Last, Quintillion Completes Arctic Cable Repair"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>WASHINGTON, Sept. 4, 2025 \u2013 Alaska-based Quintillion has completed repairs to its subsea fiber optic cable that was severed by sea ice off the state\u2019s North Slope in the Arctic Ocean. The event happened eight months ago.<\/p>\n<p>Crews aboard the IT Integrity and CanPac Valkyrie successfully recovered, spliced, and tested the damaged segment <a href=\"https:\/\/www.quintillionglobal.com\/outage\/?ref=broadbandbreakfast.com\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">over the weekend<\/a>. Internet service providers connected to Quintillion\u2019s network are now reconfiguring systems to bring end users back online. Burial of the repaired section will continue for the next two weeks.<\/p>\n<p>Quintillion President Mac McHale said the repair marks the first phase of the wholesale broadband provider\u2019s broader resiliency strategy. Upcoming projects include a 1,000-mile subsea fiber extension from Nome to Homer, completing a statewide fiber ring to provide route diversity, and a 180-mile terrestrial fiber line between Prudhoe Bay and Utqia\u0121vik to add inland redundancy.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAs we look ahead, our focus remains clear: to build a more resilient and secure digital infrastructure for rural and urban Alaska,\u201d McHale said. \u201cWe recognize the challenges of operating in this environment \u2013 and we are responding with innovation, investment, and long-term planning,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n<p>McHale has said he did not think the fiber was severed by a hostile power.<\/p>\n<p>The company dispatched vessels <a href=\"https:\/\/broadbandbreakfast.com\/quintillion-to-repair-broken-arctic-fiber-line-after-six-month-delay\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">this July<\/a> to repair the undersea cable lines, which were severed in January 2025. The internet-service provider had to postpone repairs until summer because of Arctic conditions, such as darkness and thick sea ice surrounding the line.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>In the months between the January cable break and this week\u2019s repair, Quintillion relied on a patchwork of backup solutions to keep communities connected.<\/p>\n<p>Quintillion lit a temporary backhaul using a satellite ground station in Nome and the still-intact Nome\u2013Utqia\u0121vik segments of its subsea network. By late February, the company reported that services in Nome were \u201cactive, operational, and stable,\u201d with some customers already back to pre-outage capacity.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Over the following weeks, attention shifted north, with Utqia\u0121vik gaining restoral capacity by mid-March and reconfiguration work continuing in Kotzebue, Point Hope, and Wainwright. By April, Quintillion announced that those three communities were fully service-ready, with adoption ramping up as local internet providers integrated users onto the interim links.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>This was not the first time a single cable break has disrupted Alaska\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WASHINGTON, Sept. 4, 2025 \u2013 Alaska-based Quintillion has completed repairs to its subsea fiber optic cable that was&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":114953,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[1638,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-114952","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-internet","8":"tag-internet","9":"tag-technology","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114952","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=114952"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114952\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/114953"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=114952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=114952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=114952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}