Well, there's one advantage to global warming: The Kodiak-Kenai Cable Company (KKCC) has announced plans to finance, design, build and operate an express undersea fiber optic cable connecting Asia and Europe, routed through the Arctic, according to an article in the Kodiak Daily Mirror.
Construction of the $1.2 billion, 10,000-mile ArcticLink is expected to start in 2011 and be completed by 2013. It uses "a politically stable and secure route" through Japan, the United States, Canada, Greenland, the Arctic region, and the United Kingdom.
"The project will also utilize four, 40 gigabit per second sub sea fiber pairs, providing four times the existing capacity per wavelength for a combined system capacity of 6.4 terabits per second," the Kodiak Daily Mirror said. "It will also have record setting latencies of less than 90 milliseconds. That is nearly a 50 percent reduction compared to today’s preferred Asia-Europe route latency times."
However, while it will bring faster Internet to Unalaska and Prudhoe Bay, it won't improve service to other parts of western Alaska, said KUCB News. The Northern Fiber Optic Link project, another KKCC project that is aimed at bringing high speed Internet to all of the communities in western Alaska, is a separate project to be funded, if accepted, by the stimulus.