
Microwave Towers Bring the Internet to Remote Alaska Villages - jonbaer
https://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/wireless/109-microwave-towers-bring-the-internet-to-remote-alaska-villages
======
sergers
We had to deploy 31 server solution across 31 islands in Nunavut.

Each one was connected via microwave with line connectivity to Ontario from a
central location.

Each location had to be able to operate independently incase of connection
failure, but would resync to the central system which is connected to the
mainland.

The hardest part wasn't the connectivity, it was the the logistics and time
needed to deliver people and equipment via floatplane to deploy.

Edit: it was definitely a logistics nightmare. We had to pack our skids with
alot of height and weight requirements in mind to fit.

The floatplane ran very limited, and couldn't run throughout the year due to
ice/weather(we had like 6 months most). It took us 2 years to deploy all
locations.

~~~
makmanalp
Via floatplane, wow. Some technicians have it rough.

~~~
asteli
Speaking from my experience in Alaska, it's impressive how people have adapted
the use of aircraft to accommodate the nonexistent or often unusable road
infrastructure.

I remember traveling by rail and passing a long row of houses with small
aircraft and bushplanes parked outside, with a cleared grassy strip to one
side to act as a runway.

~~~
whatshisface
Difficulty aside, that sounds like it would be a cool way to live. How were
they employed?

~~~
barsonme
I can't speak for the guy you replied to, but I've had family and friends who
live up there and there's a lot of seasonal outdoors stuff. For example, run a
snowmobile business in the winter. Work as a mechanic on big rigs (aka get
paid to sit around until something breaks).

In rural areas (at least around here) it's not uncommon to work 4 on, 4 off
(or similar) shifts which makes stuff like that a lot easier. My cousins (one
of whom lived in North Pole, AK) do something kinda similar: they have their
houses in the "city" where their job is, but their "other" homes out on their
30+ acres of property in the woods > 1 hour outside of town. They don't fly
in, but it's kinda the same concept.

I also know of at least one rancher in eastern Washington whose daughter flies
her plane to school in the morning.

------
loufe
Microwave towers are a godsend for people like my folks. They live a 5 minute
drive from a city of 40,000 but yet cannot get even DSL. Microwave towers have
allowed them to get 10mbps conenction with no bandwidth cap, and they were
happy to pay the $500 installation costs and $80 monthly fees for it.

------
esaym
6mbs as the max? That sounds awful... I was expecting more with dedicated
microwave towers.

~~~
kitsunesoba
It nicely highlights why optimizing sites and web apps for size is still
important. Speeds in excess of 20mpbs may be common in metropolitan areas, but
there are parts of the US have to make due with much less.

I can’t imagine how frustrating it must be for these people to have to deal
with the better part of the popular web weighing 12mb+ per page load.
Adblockers must be required for many sites to be of any use at all.

~~~
leesalminen
I recently moved from a 1Gbps pipe from BigCo to 5Mbps provided by a WISP [0].

It’s been interesting. I definitely click back on more websites than I used to
due to slow page load.

The bigger issue is with streaming video services. YouTube, YouTube TV,
Netflix and HBO are all fine. Hulu and Sling are nearly unusable.

All in all, it’s not as bad as I had feared.

[0] We’re at 7k feet in altitude and there is a point to point WiFi network
blasting down the majority of the canyon. All Ubiquiti gear. The ISP is owned
and operated by a couple locals.

~~~
realusername
My brother is living with 512k, you adapt to the low speed at some point. We
have a local Plex with ~10TB of video on it since all streaming websites are
unusable.

------
AdamJacobMuller
> US $300 million of investment and six years of construction

Seems to me like they spent 300 million dollars and took 6 years to install a
system that was out of date 6 years ago. Sad.

~~~
jcrawfordor
Microwave has actually remained fairly static in terms of the technology
capabilities lately, so they probably couldn't achieve much more if they
started again today. Short distance microwave links can push a gigabit, but
not by a lot, and only over (relatively) short distances. Running towers at
close enough spacing to increase bandwidth, or even laying cable, would be a
much larger investment and you ultimately have to play the cost vs bandwidth
tradeoff here.

~~~
dboreham
This is not true. Shannon capacity limit has remained the same of course but
reduction in the cost of processing has meant that it is vastly cheaper to
deploy higher coding rate modulation schemes and MIMO than it was only a few
years ago. Gigabit speeds over long range (10's of km) are quite achievable.

The article actually talks about 6Mbits/s as the service speed per subscriber
so obviously the backhaul is going to need to be much faster, especially since
its ring topology means it has to serve many towns.

~~~
StudentStuff
I'd figure they're probably working with a few hundred megs of connectivity at
most. Thing is, as speeds increase (esp when you go above a few Mbps), usage
actually stays pretty flat. Mostly, videos load faster leaving an emptier pipe
for the next customer.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Usage increases over time though, as perceived speed increase leads to heavier
stuff being deployed on the Internet. Over time, we started to stream music,
then video, then HD video, then 60FPS Full-HD video, 360° video; I don't see
this trend stopping with time.

(And then there's software bloat, which also increases with time.)

------
TulliusCicero
Very cool engineering-wise, but it's not clear to me that subsidies to rural
areas like this make sense in the long-term. Like just efficiency-wise, would
it not make more sense to have rules that encourage people to live in places
where it's easier to provide basic services?

------
chiph
Tom Scott went to Greenland last year, where they also have microwave towers
for internet access:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5G9BHrAgQz0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5G9BHrAgQz0)

------
z3t4
For $300 million usd you would get a lot of fiber cable. I wonder how well
those micro towers operates in a snowstorm and covered with ice.

