Sometimes Fiber to the Home is Not Enough

Sometimes, even optical fiber access isn’t enough. Consider Yukon Telephone, which serves extraordinarily isolated communities in rural Alaska. The company recently installed a fiber-to-the-home network serving Tanana, a village of about 300 people, mostly Athabascan indians, on the Yukon River in the vast interior of Alaska.

So you would  think Yukon Telephone customers in Tanana now can take advantage of optical fiber speeds. But there’s a problem, company  President Don Eller says. All the backhaul is by satellite (Tanana is really isolated. Historically, moving bulkier goods in and out of the village has required waiting until the Yukon unfreezes in the spring, and then halting again when the winter freeze comes again.)



And given the high cost of satellite backhaul (up to $12,000 a month for a single T1 circuit), the entire Tanana fiber to home network has 3 Mbps worth of bandwidth. If you wonder why so much of the “broadband stimulus” spending was for middle mile projects, Tanana shows why.



Tanana now has a state of the art fiber to the home network. What it doesn’t have is an affordable way to connect with an Internet point of presence at speeds that take advantage of that local access capability. The middle mile issue is the barrier, not the local access network.



The backhaul problem faced by Yukon Telephone, show the huge investment challenges and revenue models for fiber to home services. Everyone agrees people need more bandwidth, and for a fixed network, optical fiber is the long-term solution.



What remains unsettled is the revenue model, and therefore the wisdom of investing in such infrastructure.