The Alaskan Phone System
by Ice
You're probably looking at the title of this article. "The Alaskan phone system? Who cares?!?!?!?"
But the Alaskan phone system is actually very interesting and different from most others. Alaska was admitted into the union second to last from Hawaii, currently has the largest land mass by far (more than 500,000 square miles), and has second-to-the-last population of any state with roughly 500,000 people.
This make sore a very interesting telco setup... Less than one person per square mile, statistically.
Anchorage, the largest city with around half of the state's population, runs on nine DMS-100s. Two of these are owned by the military bases, and there are two additional DMS "remotes" for residential areas. The local telco, ATU (Anchorage Telephone Utility, recently named "ATU Telecommunications"), is the only one owned by the local government in the nation (we aren't in an RBOC - no US West, etc.), but it's at least as lame as other telcos. A residential line is about $16 a month, and a business one is $30 a month. We have Caller ID, Last-Call Return, and Continuous Redial as of a few months ago, but no other other CLASS features to speak of. We don't yet have ISDN available, in-town T1s cost from $160 to $200 a month (plus $137 a mile!). Fiber Ethernet links are a minimum of $600/month. The payphones were 15 cents until about two years ago when they went to 25 cents. I've not had much success Blue Boxing off of our lines, but that's just within Anchorage.
There are two long distance carriers in Alaska. General Communications Inc. (GCI - 10077) and Alascom (10866). No AT&T, no Sprint, no MCI. However, GCI formed an alliance with MCI in the last year, and Alascom (who was owned by Pacific Telecom) was recently bought by AT&T and renamed AT&T Alascom. As of yet, nothing major has come out of the GCI deal except some reciprocal calling plans and honoring of calling cards. The rates aren't actually that bad, averaging between 10 and 15 cents night rates to call the rest of the U.S.
The telco has no clue when it comes to their tariffs. 30-way Meet-Me's are only $2/month, and there's a feature named "Malicious Call Hold" which they forgot to omit - if someone calls you from within your wire center, you press the button on your Meridian phone and they can't hang up. It's fun... Customer Data Change (you get an account on the switch and get to play with your lines) is only $4/month, but there's a $7,500 start-up! Simplified Message Desk Interface (SMDI - read your philes) costs $600/month! These are only available under Centrex (yes, we do have Centrex...), but the even funnier part is that a normal Centrex line is two dollars a month cheaper than a normal business line! I don't know what they were smoking when they came up with their pricing (including their inflated leased line prices above), but it's the government - what can you say?
The rural telcos are a lot more fun to play with. Alaska has two of our own communications satellite, "Aurora" and "Aurora II," stationed in geostationary orbit above us. They're owned by Alascom, but GCI gets access to it (as with all of Alascom's equipment). Alascom makes these crappy "CO-in-a-trailer" things that they ship off to all the Eskimo villages and such, which, from what I can tell, are some old crossbar stuff with a transmitter/controller. There's a 14-foot dish or so aimed at the satellite.
These trailers are capable of handling 100-200 numbers in a single exchange, and they actually have payphones on some of them. I got a trunk tone once, without using any illicit means to get it! I received an incoming call, the operator wanted to bill me something for it, so chucked in a coin (what the hell, I'm just lame), heard a few clicks, and bam... I just about killed myself because my BB was 500 miles away in Anchorage.
All of the "major" towns (with more than 2,500 people) usually have a microwave tower or a larger satellite setup and switch. The satellite is also nice because you can make calls from just about anywhere if you're 'leet enough to have the suitcase-transceiver kit. The rest of the state is littered with Earth stations and toll complexes, etc. There's also fiber optics from Fairbanks to Anchorage to Juneau, the three major cities, which covers quite a few hundred miles on the way.
We also have a fiber line in between Japan and Portland (don't ask me why they didn't use Washington) named the "Trans-Pacific Cable" that's used for 99 percent of long distance calls, but it has been cut before by boats and other "unknown causes" (four times in the just the last year!), so the satellite is still used for backup.
The long distance companies must make their money through leased lines, as a T1 to Seattle costs in the ballpark of $15,000 bucks a month!
Alascom is the long distance company that built most of the statewide phone system, and it got all kinds of concessions from the FCC during deregulation by arguing that we never had AT&T and Alaska was a "special case." As is, we didn't even have the 1-907- or even the 1- dialing until fairly recently. Times change so quickly - I still remember the "You do not need to dial a 1..." recording when you did use it.
To my [probably inaccurate] knowledge, I was the last person in the state to dial long distance without a 1.
The cellphone setup isn't that different from other places. We have Cellular One and MACTel (wireline) within the Anchorage-and-vicinity area. There are other carriers that handle farther-out communications, which can be tricky with the 2-carrier FCC limit (and other cell sites so nearby).
A really cool thing is that the cellular systems extend through in-state long distance boundaries, so you can place calls to some areas for just the normal airtime fees. They actually route the calls through the towers to evade the long distance company.
With the exception of Anchorage, Alaska's phone system is a mixture of old equipment rigged up to new equipment and somehow interfaced with the rest of the network. Anchorage has relatively new switches, but the marketing department is too stupid to realize that they could sell some of the features that they could provide... It makes a great playground for phreakers, at least in places other than Anchorage, and who knows - maybe we could have some con up here sometime. It would be scary but funny watching all of you driving the Alaskan-Canadian Highway.