Wi-Fi very much alive in Deadhorse

Israeli wireless broadband solutions provider Alvarion has been selected by the Arctic Slope Telephone Association Cooperative (ASTAC) to deploy its Wi-Fi equipment for use by workers, residents and ice-road truckers across the North Slope region of Alaska. ASTAC provides local and long-distance voice services, internet access and wireless services across a remote, road-less, arctic area of more than 90,000 square miles. Additionally, ASTAC is a provider of pay-per-use Wi-Fi at the region’s petroleum industry exploration and production camps located in the Deadhorse-Prudhoe Bay region. Using spatially adaptive ‘Beamforming’ technology and interference mitigation algorithms, ASTAC is able to deploy fewer access points in each camp, significantly reducing the labour costs and cabling associated with installations in such intense environmental conditions. Chris Daniels, Alvarion’s vice president of sales (North America), commented: ‘In a region of Alaska that truckers can only access in the winter via ice roads, providing reliable solutions plays a critical role in helping the workers and business to communicate and thrive’.