GCN Considers Dissolving
Nathan Borson
At its meeting next Monday night, the advisory board of City-owned Gustavus Community Network (GCN) will consider disbanding its municipal Internet service due to declining membership and the advent of other local Internet options. The Gustavus City Council is scheduled to act on the board’s recommendation at its regular meeting on December 14. A resolution drafted by GCN staff proposes that GCN will discontinue service soon after all its subscribers have access to service as good or better than what they now receive from GCN, and that contractor Corvid Computing help transition GCN customers to other, ostensibly competing, providers. The board seeks input from subscribers and the public. Its meeting will be at 5:30 pm Monday, December 7, at City Hall.
GCN, originally Gustavus SEAKNet, established the first local Internet service in 1995, reaching a high of 205 subscribers (almost all dial-up) in 2005. Membership plunged after 2006 when degradation of local telephone lines ruined modem communication for most of the community, Alaska Communications launched its 3G mobile data service, satellite Internet became available, and dial-up service became increasingly inadequate for an ever-more media-rich Internet. Though GCN built a limited wireless network, membership continued to decline as AT&T upgraded its mobile service to 4G, and now David Kunat’s Byte Networking is ambitiously building a last-mile network in Gustavus. “GCN filled a need and was the best or only Internet option for many Gustavus residents for many years,” according to Nathan Borson, co-owner of Corvid Computing, the contracted system manager for GCN. “We went as far as we could with what we had, but were unable to bridge a huge gap in coverage, reliability, and affordability.” GCN received a state grant to plan for a robust last-mile network to serve the entire community, but was unable to obtain funding to construct the proposed $2.4 million hybrid fiber-coax network. Aside from the planning grant, a federal grant that created Gustavus SEAKNet is the only taxpayer support GCN has received. Since 1996 the Internet service has been funded entirely by subscriber fees.
As of November, 2015, GCN had about 23 remaining subscribers. GCN staff expects all of these will have faster, cheaper, and more reliable Internet service available to them by July, 2016, especially if Corvid Computing is freed to help other providers expand their service. Under the current management contract with the city, Corvid Computing is barred from competing with GCN in this manner. The draft resolution would waive this provision, allowing Corvid Computing to assist GCN customers and other Internet providers to make a smooth transition and disband GCN as soon as possible, before it loses too much money as subscribers trickle away.
Satellite Internet service is already available to everyone with a view of the southern sky, but suffers from rain fade, slow upload speeds, congestion, data caps, and high latency. For these reasons, GCN staff consider satellite service inferior to existing GCN service, not an adequate replacement. Some GCN subscribers will be able to get faster, cheaper, and more reliable service via AT&T’s existing 4G mobile data service, but the necessary cellular signal is absent or too weak for other GCN subscribers. The best option for many will be the new service being rapidly deployed by Byte Networking. Some of the remaining GCN subscribers are National Park Service (NPS) employees living in government-furnished housing at Bartlett Cove, where no other service has been available. NPS is working to deliver much faster and cheaper Internet service to its employee housing area, as well as the rest of Bartlett Cove. Byte Networking has already brought 10 Mbps service to the edge of the NPS network, with higher speeds to come, and NPS should complete the network connections necessary to deliver this new service to its housing area by next Spring or early Summer.
“GCN has served its purpose,” says Borson, who has served the community network as a volunteer and contractor since its inception. “I would love to have seen an excellent publicly-owned communications network, but public funding to build one is not available. So I’m excited to see David Kunat actually doing something about the problem, and I hope to help him meet the demand for quality Internet service in Gustavus. If the Gustavus City Council agrees to discontinue GCN, Corvid Computing will work with each individual GCN subscriber to make a smooth transition to a better service of their choice.”