In the southwestern United States, we provide fixed services to business customers such as schools, libraries, and internet service providers.
Network. In Alaska, we provide communications and IT solutions that connect Alaskans, as well as customers in the continental United States to the world. This is based on an extensive facilities-based wireline telecommunications network in Alaska that we operate. In our US operations, we continuously upgrade our network to provide higher levels of performance, higher bandwidth speeds, increased levels of security and additional value-added services to our customers. We operate 211,369 terrestrial and submarine fiber miles which serve as the backbone of our network as well as now serving over 1,036 buildings with fiber. Our networks are monitored for performance around the clock in redundant monitoring centers to provide a high level of reliability and performance. Our network is extensive within Alaska’s urban areas and connects our largest markets, including Anchorage, Fairbanks and Juneau with each other and the contiguous states as well as many rural areas. We continue to utilize Fixed Wireless technology to reach even more customers, bringing total homes and businesses passed to more than 18,000 at the end of 2021. In 2021, we won additional spectrum through the FCC auction for licenses in the shared Citizens Broadband Radio Service (“CBRS”). CBRS spectrum is effective in areas with lower population densities. In Alaska, we also continue to expand our Multi-Dwelling Unit (“MDU”) offering utilizing fiber or fixed wireless backhaul, with more than 7,400 MDUs now served.
We own and operate two undersea fiber optic cable systems that provide diverse routing from our Alaskan network to our facilities in Oregon and Washington. These facilities provide the most survivable service to and from Alaska, with key monitoring and disaster recovery capabilities for our customers. We also have usage rights on a third undersea fiber network connected to the continental United States. Our network in Oregon and Washington includes terrestrial transport components linking our landing stations to a Network Operations Control Center in Hillsboro, Oregon and collocation facilities in Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington. In addition, AKORN®, one of our undersea fiber optic cable systems, connects our Alaska network from Homer, Alaska to our facilities in Florence, Oregon along a diverse path within Alaska, the Pacific Northwest and undersea in the Pacific Ocean. Northstar, our other undersea fiber optic system, has cable landing facilities in Whittier, Juneau, and Valdez, Alaska, and Nedonna Beach, Oregon. In 2020, we completed major network upgrades to the Northstar fiber line, increasing capacity by more than five times. Together, our subsea fiber optic cables systems, AKORN® and Northstar, provide extensive bandwidth as well as survivability protection designed to serve our own, as well as our most demanding customers’ critical communications requirements. Through our landing stations in Oregon, we also provide an at-the-ready landing point for other large fiber optic cables, and their operators, connecting the U.S. to networks in Asia and other parts of the world.
Our terrestrial fiber network on the North Slope of Alaska allows us to provide broadband solutions to the oil and gas sector and continues to advance our sales of managed IT services. We have developed a satellite earth station network and acquired C-band transponder space on Eutelsat’s E115WB satellite to provide Internet backhaul connectivity through satellite service.
We have deployed, and are working to deploy more, carrier-grade fiber optic networks strategically throughout the western United States to continue to serve governmental, retail and tribal customers in Arizona and Nevada.
Competition. In Alaska, we face strong competition in our markets from larger competitors with substantial resources. For traditional voice and broadband services, we compete with GCI and AT&T on a statewide basis, and smaller providers such as Matanuska Telephone Association, Inc., a co-op owned telephone and internet service provider operating in the Matanuska regional area of Alaska, on a more local basis. As the largest facilities-based operator in Alaska, GCI is the dominant statewide provider of broadband, voice, wireless and video services. We believe that AT&T’s primary focus is to be the provider of voice and broadband services to its nation-wide customers and that AT&T tends to use its existing broadband network to serve these customers or it leases capacity from GCI or Alaska Communications to augment its existing network.
In the western United States, we experience competitive pressures from ILEC providers such as AT&T, Lumen and Frontier along with their channel partners. Similarly, national and regional fiber providers such as Zayo and Inyo Networks also offer our customers services and employ vast wholesale channel solutions as well. On a smaller scale, we also see competition from companies with cable offerings such as Spectrum and Comcast along with a few regional fiber network operators, such as Inyo Networks, Kit Carson, and Valley Communications. Our ability to offer full-service