FCC notice signals possible ownership change for Quintillion cable system
FCC filing opens a 14-day comment window on Quintillion’s possible sale, raising questions about outage response, reliability and future investment on the North Slope.
A Federal Communications Commission notice on June 25 opened a 14-day comment window on a filing that could shift oversight of the submarine cable linking Utqiaġvik, Wainwright, Point Hope, Prudhoe Bay, Kotzebue and Nome. Quintillion Subsea Operations, LLC sought consent to transfer control of Quintillion Subsea from Q Gateway Ultimate Holdings LLC to GCI Holdings LLC, and Quintillion filed an amendment on June 23 to make corrections and clarifications.
The filing, listed as SCL-T/C-20260504-00065 and submitted May 19, is being handled under the commission’s streamlined procedures. The FCC notice names Quintillion as the sole licensee for the cable system.
On Jan. 18, 2025, Quintillion’s subsea fiber line broke near Oliktok Point, disrupting connectivity across the North Slope and Northwest Alaska. The North Slope Borough learned of the break the next morning and was assessing impacts, while Quintillion’s outage updates continued through the year. In June 2023, a separate cable scoured by sea ice 34 miles offshore took Quintillion’s Arctic fiber network down and left Utqiaġvik, Wainwright, Kotzebue and Nome offline for 14 weeks.
GCI announced on April 22 that it had entered a definitive agreement to acquire Quintillion and that the deal would combine Quintillion’s more than 1,800 miles of existing subsea and terrestrial fiber with about 1,500 miles of planned expansion. The company said the acquisition would improve reliability, resiliency and performance for Alaska’s communications infrastructure. Quintillion President Mac McHale said the company had built “resilient, Arctic-ready fiber infrastructure” in one of the world’s most challenging operating environments, and said GCI would bring the scale needed to carry the network forward.
Federal broadband materials put Quintillion’s Phase 1 system at 1,182 miles of subsea fiber and 505 miles of terrestrial fiber, operating since 2017 and delivering gigabit and higher bandwidth service across remote Northwest and North Slope communities.
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