Establishing connections

Coffman Cove, Alaska, has built a wireless Internet and satellite communications network to provide high-speed Internet connections to residents of the small town. City officials expect the network to help local businesses expand and to help residents find work online.

Coffman Cove, located in southeastern Alaska, is a remote community that has only 140 residents in winter and 200 residents when temperatures increase in the summer. Transportation to the community is limited to a four-seat bush plane service, or a three-hour ferry ride from Ketchikan followed by a two-and-a-half-hour car ride on dirt and gravel roads. In the city, there are several bed and breakfast hotels, some fishing/hunting lodges, a bunkhouse, two small stores and a gas station.

The year-round inhabitants are commercial fishermen, road construction workers and loggers. The city has significant appeal to adventurous fisherman and tourists who visit in the summer to observe the area’s wildlife, such as whales, bald eagles and bears. “It’s just really, really beautiful,” says Coffman Cove Councilmember Elaine Price. “We say it’s like living in the fifties. Nobody locks their doors ever. The kids can go out and play all day, and you don’t have to worry. There’s no crime at all. And whenever anyone gets hurt or sick, the whole community comes out.”

The city’s first taste of the Internet came with a short-lived local Internet service provider (ISP), Cove Connect, which used the city’s microwave phone system to offer dial-up service. “It was too expensive and too slow,” Price says. Subscribers paid $70 a month for connections that frequently dipped as low as 14.4 kilobits per second (kbps).

When Cove Connect disconnected, residents had to call long distance to connect to AOL or WorldCom service, which was just as slow and even more expensive. “When you access the Internet, you’re always conscious of how long you’re on there,” Price says. “You always just go on, do what you have to do and get off. There’s never an opportunity to search around or shop. You just don’t do that.”

Some residents began using broadband satellite Internet service from McLean, Va.-based StarBand Communications so they could work online for a medical transcription company. They investigated options for extending the service to the rest of the city and proposed a plan to use municipal funds to establish a wireless ISP (WISP) and satellite communications network. In March 2003, the city council decided to fund the $30,000 project with federal relief funds that the city received in 2000 when the logging industry shut down in the area. The city received a business permit from the state to run the Coffman Cove ISP, and the city council passed an ordinance that allowed the city to collect monthly payments for access to the broadband utility.

Coffman Cove contracted with Costa Mesa, Calif.-based SkyFrames to provide a satellite terminal and wireless hotspot equipment. The terminal delivers near-T1 equivalent connections and supplies the community with broadband speeds comparable to those found in metropolitan areas in the lower 48 states. The company installed the electronics for the wireless infrastructure and trained the city’s three full-time employees to install and run the WISP. The company monitors and maintains the wireless system remotely from its headquarters.

Coffman Cove has multiple elevation changes and dense 120-foot trees. Because of the terrain, the city installed 70-foot telephone poles and used municipal easements to place wireless access points at various locations around the city. The company installed three access points that cover the majority of the city and flat-panel rooftop transceivers at each subscriber’s home. Since the network was completed in June, 35 households, or about half the city’s population, have begun using the network.

The Coffman Cove WISP delivers an asynchronous connection of 128 kbps upstream and up to 1 megabit per second (mbps) downstream. Price expects downstream throughput will top out at around 440 kbps. Subscribers pay $35 a month for service.

With the new high-speed Internet connections, residents have more employment options. “We think it could have some substantial economic impact,” Price says. “More and more jobs are available over the Internet now. The medical transcription work has been successful here. If people could work at home, that would encourage more of them to enter the workforce.”

A few local businesses may be able to exploit the Internet, too, Price says. For example, boutique logging operations could market select lumber over the Internet. Additionally, the community has received federal funding to build and operate a fish processing plant, and it plans to use the Web to gather orders for small quantities of fish and ship them to other parts of the country. “The Internet would be a major marketing tool,” Price says. “We’re looking at selling to all of the continental United States, especially anywhere Alaska Airlines flies.”