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PETROLEUM DIRECTORY: Telecommunications on the North Slope — big changes for small villages ASTAC develops wireline and wireless infrastructure that takes North Slope telecommunications out of the shack and into the future Mara Severin PNA Contributing Writer
You could call Fairbanks, and you could call Moscow, but you couldn’t call your neighbor across the street,” says Dave Fauske, describing life in rural Alaska, prior to the formation of the Arctic Slope Telephone Association Cooperative, ASTAC. Fauske, General Manager of ASTAC, briefly described communication options if you lived in a village community in the 1970s.
The Alaska Bush phone usually resided in a little shack or in an entry way to a building, and the people in the village would line up to use it, he says. You’d pick it up, get an operator in Fairbanks, and you were limited to credit card and collect calls. Receiving a phone call was even dicier. “If you called a village, and there wasn’t a full blizzard blowing, someone would pick up and say, ‘this is Kaktovik answering,’” explains Fauske, with a chuckle. “And you might say, ‘I’m trying to get a hold of John Doe,’ and the other guy might say, ‘Well, I think I saw him down at the store.’ And then he’d go off to look for him.” Not the smoothest operation any way you look at it.
Creating a truly cooperative co-op Now that ASTAC offers North Slope residents not only local and long-distance telephone service, but also wireless and internet services, those days seem almost as remote as the villages themselves. ASTAC’s journey from idea to reality began only as far back as the passing of the Land Claims Bill in 1971. “These regional corporations like ASRC and village corporations were supposed to plunge ahead into business entrepreneurship with no communications,” says Fauske. “They tried it for a year or two, but it was impossible to bring about corporate development without basic telecommunications.” By the mid-’70s, the borough assembly, the borough utility board and the regional corporation concluded that there would have to be a phone system.
Fauske, at that time, worked for the regional corporation and was assigned to do research and development for a regional telephone system. Nobody was interested, he says. “The major companies wanted to serve Prudhoe, but to heck with the villages,” he says. The research led him to conclude that the only viable option was to form a cooperative. This route would allow them to qualify for low interest REA loans and long term payback. The steps that followed show how truly cooperative the members of the co-op would prove to be. The regional corporation provided the seed funding for pre-engineering study costs. The borough made land and buildings available for the new co-op’s central offices which speeded things up and reduced start-up costs.
Work began in 1980 and by 1982, all eight original service districts had the basic phone service that the urban communities of the state had long taken for granted.
Fauske likes to dwell on the truly cooperative nature of the phone service. It is even the basis for ASTAC’s most recent advertising campaign which states: ASTAC, where you actually belong. “The people that get the service own the company,” says Fauske emphatically. “We’re in the arctic, on 92,000 square miles, in this northern corner of America. Our member/owners are not only BP and Phillips and Halliburton. Our member/owners are subsistence hunters and subsistence fishers who have been here for 6000 years.” Quite an Alaska image.
Wooing the wary through their wallets If it sounds like a business fairy tale, it came complete with its poison apples. “Before we got approval we were understandably opposed by every single oil company and nearly all the oilfield contractors in the North Slope,” says Fauske. “Alascom, which held a special certificate for local service, had a lot of influence,” explains Fauske, “and all the leaders in Prudhoe filed opposition to this petition from such a small unknown start up.” The opposition was disconcerting, however it was short-lived. One afternoon, ASTAC distributed the required list of proposed tariff charges and the next morning, nearly every single company withdrew their opposition. “At that time the price of these special business lines for local telephone service ranged up to several hundred dollars per month,” explains Fauske with a smile. “Ours was $11.65.”
According to Fauske, this motivated the attorneys and accountants for the various companies to look more carefully at ASTAC’s application. “They looked and saw that a very thorough engineering and financial plan had been filed,” he says. “It took a few years for them to develop total confidence in our ability to provide all of the services that they require.” But as the years have gone by, he says, “we have provided these services efficiently, faithfully, and economically and now these business relationships prosper.”
From jet plane to these three-wheeler — ASTAC technicians get around Providing these services “efficiently, faithfully, and economically,” in the harsh conditions of the North Slope is no walk in the park. Logistically, says Fauske, it requires complex planning, flexibility, and employees with an adventurous spirit. A video that ASTAC produced for viewing at an FCC hearing on universal service issues, shows a well-traveled day in the life of an ASTAC technician. In it, Jeff Anderson is seen leaving Anchorage and flying to Barrow, then getting on a little airplane to fly to a village, then getting on a three wheeler and driving around a small village fixing telephones and performing various system maintenance. At the end of the day, Anderson gets on another small airplane, flies to another village, and does it all over again.
In addition to constant and varied travel, an ASTAC technician provides a wide variety of services unlike, according to Fauske, the jobs of technicians at ACS or other large, urban phone companies. “The first thing a technician might do is climb a pole and do outside plant work. The next thing he might do is go to a private home and do an installation or inside repair work. Then, he might go to the school and assist in reconfiguring distance delivery education equipment and consult on distance education applications. Then he might go over to the village corporation and talk about a new key system,” says Fauske. “So our technicians are doing outside plant work, inside plant work, customer service, marketing and then maintenance — maintaining the switch, maintaining the battery plant, and the vehicles.”
Not everyone could stand up to the rigors of this kind of job. “It sounds like a real remote, tough, nasty job, and you’d think that our employees wouldn’t last very long, but it’s just the opposite,” says Fauske. “It is remote and it is challenging but we’ve had really exceptional field employees and extraordinarily low turnover in our 22 years of existence.” He points out that in addition to competitive pay and comprehensive benefits, all technicians who do field operations work a three-week-on, three-week-off schedule. “Some people thrive on that schedule,” he says. “You have to find a cadre of people whose lifestyle and happiness is augmented by that kind of schedule.”
Keeping up with the industry’s ‘nova star’ A day in the life of a technician might serve as a good model for ASTAC’s overall philosophy. “You can’t stand still,” says Fauske. “You have to continually upgrade.” Recently, ASTAC performed switch upgrades including the central office switch in Deadhorse which has been replaced with a more state-of-the-art switch. The wireless switch was also replaced and the service upgraded recently.
Now ASTAC has the wireline and wireless infrastructure in the oil patch enabling it to meet most of the requirements of the industry. “The trick now is to keep up with expansion,” says Fauske. “The problem with the oil patch is that it doesn’t stand still. It’s like a nova star. As the industry moves and expands our mission is to keep up.”
But keep up quietly, according to Fauske. “We like to use the word ‘transparent’. Our customers want to pick up the phone and the dial tone is there. For many, many years, prior to the telecommunications explosion happiness, for a telephone company, was not being noticed.” Too late. For quality of life for the residents and workers in the North Slope, they’ve noticed. There’s no doubt that they’ve noticed.
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