Astound Broadband's 108-mile Oregon fiber link ushers in a multi-service look
What is the Bifrost cable?
Bifrost, which spans over 20,000 km, is a subsea cable system that directly connects Singapore to the west coast of North America via Indonesia through the Java Sea and Celebes Sea. The cable system also connects Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, the United States (Guam, Oregon), and Mexico. The cable's main trunk runs from Singapore to the US via Indonesia, and it includes branches to other locations. The Bifrost project is a collaboration between Amazon, Meta, and PT. Telekomunikasi Indonesia International (Telin), and Keppel Telecommunications & Transportation Limited (Keppel T&T).
Astound Broadband is no stranger to serving underserved communities or working with submarine cable operators, and its latest build in Oregon’s Tillamook County is no different.
The new backhaul network offers the best of both worlds: it provides connectivity to data centers and residential fiber-based broadband and can even improve the local public utility district's power grid capabilities.
Astound recently completed a 108-mile underground fiber route along Highway 6, bringing broadband connectivity to more than 270 homes in rural Tillamook County for the first time.
The fiber route, which was constructed underground, runs from a submarine cable landing station (CLS) located south of Pacific City to Hillsboro, passing through Tillamook. It enables fiber-based internet service along the highway, an area that previously had limited connectivity. This project is partially funded by Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) investment in the Bifrost submarine cable system.
Astound built a new terrestrial backhaul network of cables in Hillsboro, Oregon, through a partnership with Tillamook Lightwave from Pacific City into Hillsboro.
Tillamook Lightwave, a community-focused special district, currently serves organizations such as the Tillamook County government, County Emergency Services and 911, the Tillamook School District #9, Tillamook Regional Medical Center, Tillamook Bay Community College and several local businesses.
Having worked on the New Cross Pacific (NCP) and Hawaiki submarine cabling efforts as a backhaul supplier, Astound has made a name for itself in the West Coast submarine cabling markets for over 10 years.
“Those two routes (the Salmon and the Succor route) put us on the map from a subsea backhaul standpoint, specifically in Oregon,” said Matt Updenkelder, VP of Infrastructure Development for Oregon at Astound Broadband, and a longtime area resident. “Over the last ten years, we expanded from two to five routes--two in California and three in Oregon.”
Flipping the script
With over a decade of experience in the subsea cable industry, Astound noted that the industry continues to evolve.
While submarine cable opeators continued to ramp up the rollout of new cables into new markets to satisfy growing data demands, a provider would connect its facilities in a community to serve data centers and enterprise sites but would not directly communicate its plans.
“The subsea industry has morphed over the last 10 years,” Updenkelder said. “Ten years ago, the industry was secretive, but when Amazon approached us, they wanted to do things differently by engaging the public ahead of time and dispel any animosity the community might have.”
Typically, when a subsea cable provider entered a community, they would build what Updenkelder called a “tunnel from one place to another and didn’t impact the connectivity at a regional level, but we flipped the script on that for this project.”
Oregon state lawmakers have long advocated for submarine cable operators to provide greater insight and accountability of their submarine cable plans. In 2020, Meta, Facebook’s parent company, had a mishap when installing a cable.
According to an OPB report, Meta’s cabling construction contractors, Edge Cable Holdings and SubCom, were drilling into the seafloor off the coast of Tierra del Mar in Tillamook County when the drill’s bit broke. When the contractors’ staff could not recover the equipment, the companies left nearly 1,100 feet of 6-inch steel pipe, an 11-inch diameter drill tip, and 6,500 gallons of drilling fluid in the ocean.
Two months after state regulators became aware of the incident from county leaders. Facebook and Edge Holdings executives paid the state $250,000 for damages and a one-time easement fee of $135,700.
What is House Bill 2603?
Oregon’s House Bill 2603 mandates that owners or operators of undersea cables have to obtain financial assurances for installation and removal of cable and create plan for removal of cable. It also directs Department of Land Conservation and Development to review part of Territorial Sea Plan that addresses placement of cables, pipelines and other utilities in territorial sea and provide results to Ocean Policy Advisory Council.
Following Meta’s incident, Oregon lawmakers passed House Bill 2603. This legislation requires an advisory council to propose revisions to Oregon’s Territorial Sea Plan, a document that governs how the state utilizes its portion of the seafloor.
Astound rented a local community center to communicate its plans more effectively to the community, where AWS and Alcatel Submarine Cables joined to engage with the local community.
Each of the multiple contractors came in during the event, gave a presentation on their role, and addressed questions about how the network would impact them.
“There was a lot of work done up front to teach the local community what we were doing,” Updenkelder said.
A new design
As it communicated its message to the local community, Astound and its partners refreshed the design of the backhaul network route.
The route would not be a simple express lane from one community into the metro area. Instead, it was built to satisfy the contractual requirements for security and service level agreements (SLAs) and enable access to parts of the cable.
“We engineered it so we could access portions of the cable at strategic locations at our cost or a shared cost without impacting the subsea backhaul itself, or in some cases, we set separate conduits and vault systems along the path,” Updenkelder said.
He added that access to these assets enables Astound to provide services to communities lacking broadband options.
“We would leverage dollars to install new conduit at our cost or at a shared cost to add additional fiber cables to use that path over Highway 6 in ways that had not been used in the past,” Updenkelder said.
County and utility collaboration
One of the fiber networks' uses would be to provide facilities for Tillamook County and Tillamook Lightwave.
A portion of the new Wilson fiber route belongs to Tillamook Lightwave, an intergovernmental agency comprised of the Tillamook People’s Utility District (TPUD), Tillamook County, and the Port of Tillamook Bay. As part of Tillamook Lightwave’s network, the new fiber route is anticipated to increase reliability, diversity, and available bandwidth for the local community.
TPUD’s portion of the route has aerial power lines that often go down during storms. “TPUD paid the cost for us to add conduits through part of the route so they could take their power infrastructure underground,” Updenkelder said.
Additionally, Astound partnered with the State of Oregon’s forestry department, where it passed the Tillamook Forestry Center and South Fork prison camp with its network facilities.
“As part of our agreement with the state, we built laterals into both locations so they could have access to high-speed internet service,” Updenkelder said.
Improving electric reliability
The fiber network also gives the local PUD greater visibility into the electric network's performance.
Along with hooking up broadband customers, Astound is connecting the substation for the PUD. Any fiber built by Astound means Tillamook gets access to 12 strands of fiber.
Until Astound built the fiber network, it was not connected to key elements of the electric grid, including the three reclosers on Highway 6.
Reclosers protect electrical circuits. They are designed to detect and clear temporary faults quickly, automatically restoring power after a brief interruption. Circuit breakers isolate faulted sections permanently, requiring manual or remote reset.
“These sites had no connectivity to these before,” Updenkelder said. “We are bringing fiber tails to those sites and back to a repeater site.”
Since it has fiber at its recloser locations, if the power goes off, the PUD isn’t rolling out trucks to move junctions around to reroute power to the impacted places. Many areas in Oregon often suffer power outages due to strong winds and storms.
“They can now reroute power remotely with an electronically driven device like a train track where they change it to a different route,” Updenkelder said. “The PUD can do this from a desktop and program it all automatically.”
Astound also brings a fiber cable back to the Southfork substation. The result is that the PUD now has access to Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) data from the utility network that it could not access before.
By getting remote access to this data, the PUD can reroute everything and get a customer's electricity back up in minutes instead of hours.
“The ability to restore power quickly is super impactful for rural residents,” Updenkelder said. “Not only is it good for the data, but also for the customer to get online faster with their power and reroute automatically after the storm hits.”
Updenkelder said this, and the other applications it enables show how the fiber network can be used for multiple purposes.
“There’s lots of ways this project is being leveraged through our business model,” he said. “We negotiated with Amazon to leverage the assets for incremental business and reach out to existing partners throughout the state to make it more impactful beyond connecting a subsea cable to a data center.”
Improving wireless connectivity
Another benefit of Astound’s work is that it will improve wireless connectivity.
A large stretch of Oregon’s Highway 6 has no wireless service, a key concern for community members, particularly those who need to communicate with family and in emergencies.
While the new fiber pathway project does not specifically include installing cellular towers along the route, the availability of high-speed, high-capacity wired service may make installing antennas and establishing cellular service easier than before.
Astound provides fiber-based backhaul for Verizon Wireless, which offers services in the area.
“We partnered with Verizon,” Updenkelder said. “This is an emergency corridor with no cellular service and no power for about 20-30 minutes along Highway 6. “We added conduits so Verizon could add macro and micro sites.”
Serving the unserved, underserved
As part of its partnership with the county, Astound identified residential locations that were unserved or underserved by broadband.
Today, rural communities along Highway 6 have the option of either slow-speed copper-based DSL or satellite services.
“If there’s limited power and cellular connectivity, there’s limited physical connectivity for residential services,” Updenkelder said. “There are only basic DSL services in some of the areas.”
He added, “Most of the customers we’re hooking up are on a hybrid solution with a 2 Mbps DSL connection and a Starlink satellite connection of up to 100 Mbps, so when the Starlink connection went down, they had a backup DSL connection.”
Astound is equipping residents with 2 Gbps fiber-based broadband services. The company provides fiber-based services at a reduced cost because residents must pay for two providers’ services.
The provider built the first two routes with limited ability to get access to the routes later, but the third route changed the way it would design and deploy the network.
“A lot of our approach was driven by the fact that Amazon was interested in ensuring we were being transparent with the public, whereas the previous cables we worked on were more secretive,” Updenkelder said. “It’s just how the industry has changed over the past 10-12 years.”
Customers coming online
Having identified four zones of clusters of homes, Astound is already turning up customers for the FTTH services.
The company has continued to activate customers on the FTTH network since the beginning of January.
Astound is working with the county to access PUD lines in those residential areas.
However, the installation isn’t without its challenges. A key challenge is the local terrain. “Some things are lagging because of the difficult terrain,” Updenkelder said. “The entire Highway 6 goes through a mountain, but this route would have never been built had it not been for this subsea project.”
He added that “these residents would have never gotten fiber at their doorstep without leveraging dollars from some of the hyperscale activity in the consortium.”
Gales Creek, OR, residents like Nicole Martinez and her family are reaping the benefits of the new fiber-based broadband service.
Being an isolated area, Gales Creek previously had no high-speed internet connectivity. Before Astound, the family tried “just about everything” for connectivity:
The Martinez family had been using a satellite option that required her husband to climb a tree on their property to install the needed hardware, only to have a connection go down every two or three minutes. Astound delivered 1.5 Gbps, fiber-based internet access to the family’s home in January.
As one of the first high-speed internet households, Nicole and her family of five now regularly work and play online.
“This is amazing and life-changing,” said Martinez, who works from home as an interpreter services coordinator and is attending college online, working toward addiction counseling and criminal justice degrees. “Working and studying from home is now a breeze, and all five of us are connected to multiple devices with no interruptions.”
Sean Buckley
Sean is responsible for establishing and executing the editorial strategies of Lightwave and Broadband Technology Report across their websites, email newsletters, events, and other information products.