The Northwest Arctic Borough School District has entered into a five-year, $64.5 million broadband contract with telecom provider GCI, costing approximately $12.9 million annually.
The district serves 1,928 students in 13 schools plus two sites, which works out to about $6,690 per student per year. The contract holds an additional $10.1 million for non-connectivity services.
The deal, primarily funded through federal (90%) and state school broadband assistance (10%) programs raises concerns about the inflated costs and outdated technology.
Breakdown of the costs under the GCI agreement:
- Five-year total: $64,497,000
- Annual cost: $12,899,400
- Funding:
- 90% from the Federal E-Rate Program ($11,609,460/year)
- 10% from Alaska’s BAG 100 Program ($1,289,940/year)
Competing bids of the district using satellite services would run about $4,000 per month per site, totaling approximately $720,000 per year across all Northwest Arctic Borough School District’s 15 sites, which pencils out to $373 per student per year.
Many school districts have already made the switch to satellite broadband. Considering the school district chose microwave technology for all but three locations, Kotzebue-area students could be using faster, more affordable satellite broadband, and the school district’s 10% share for connectivity would have been $72,000 annually.
The GCI contract charges much higher rates for specific sites, such as:
- Satellite/Starlink-served schools (e.g., Ambler, Kobuk, Shungnak): $54,150/month per site, which is nearly 13 times more expensive.
- Microwave-served schools #1: (e.g., Buckland, Kiana, Kivalina, Noatak, Noorvik, Selawik, Deering): $92,500/month per site via GCI’s proprietary TERRA network, which is 23 times more expensive.
- Microwave-served schools #2: (Kotzebue Area): $65,000/month per site, also using the TERRA Network, which is 16 times more expensive.
The TERRA microwave network is not built for today’s Internet consumption and is being outpaced by low-earth orbit satellites such as Starlink, which offers greater scalability and lower costs. The five-year lock-in of the contract ties the Northwest Arctic School District to technology that is being replaced in a fast-evolving field.
Northwest Arctic Borough residents pay no local taxes, so this expensive program is coming from federal taxpayers and the State of Alaska, which will chip in 10%.
The decision to overlook a dramatically cheaper, modern alternative for the more expensive and nearly outdated technology raises questions about why the district is not adopting Starlink or other satellite solutions, which are already available and being used in Kotzebue and other remote sites.
GCI’s E-Rate filing can be found here and the State of Alaska BAG 100 grant awards can be found here.
This is a surprise to who? How many of these communities in rural Alaska would be around if not for the largesse of the federal and state governments? Will Governor Dunleavy exercise executive authority to reign in these wastes or he too is beholden to those that butter his bread?
That sounds like a bargain, at half the price.
The NSB doesn’t care how much it costs. Same as their executive jet fixed wing and helicopter fleet. They get an appropriation each year of the state oil and gas property tax – hundreds of millions of dollars of state money.
Honesty and common sense have no lobbyists in Juneau. One could hope that conservatives and liberals, such as the education lobby, could agree to fix a problem like this, but there is no chance. You will find highly paid lobbyists from both ends of the political spectrum work to protect misspending of this sort, and worse.
A material and measurable part of the PERS and TRS defined benefit unfunded liability (very likely $10 billion today because of recent investment results but it would be disguised by the 5-year smoothing used by the state) for the Tier 1 retirees is the boost so many of those retirees obtained by working their “high 3”
years for the NSB. Even though those DB tiers closed to new employees on 6/30/06, those employees, now mostly retired, and their named beneficiaries will be collecting that “high 3” boost for the longest living of the employee or his/her beneficiary. And – get this – those very high salaries were paid by the state granting the oil and gas property tax to the NSB. So the state misspends the money by granting it to the NSB, which then turns around and uses part of that money to increase the public employee retirement liability.
It’s boondoggles like this – spread throughout the state government – that demand that huge budget cuts precede any discussion of new taxes. My guess would be that oversights, screw-ups, and worse amounting to $3 billion can be found in the $14 billion annual state spend.
And finally, by the way, it’s boondoggles like this that for all honest, thinking Alaskans should eliminate any discussion of reverting back to DB for PERS and TRS.
Corruption abound: follow the money…
Wow this is roughly $1 million per school per year. Starlink has business plans for about $600/month, plus the high performance dish one time purchase of $1500. Even if you had to get a few of these systems to serve a school, or pay for extra data (standard business plan is 2TB a month included data, probably not enough on its own for a whole school) it would be hard to come with costs of more than say $5000 a month in the extreme for serving a school with Starlink. That’s a huge differential.
Why no context? XX times compared to what?
Why no analysis of the cost of providing service? Did you even investigate that?
Perhaps most importantly, why no comment from GCI? Did you try to contact them?
I believe it, that’s one reason why the PFD is getting attacked so hard…to pay for others freebies