Phone service, 911 line experience outages

Landline phones at several businesses, offices and residences across Nome were down or experienced intermittent outages for over a week. As of February 2, many landlines were functional again.
The Nome Police Department reported that the 911 number was working only intermittently. Nomeites were notified via Facebook to call in emergencies an alternate cell phone number. The department’s phone outages occurred on January 25, 28 and 29 when regular department numbers were down.
As of the afternoon of Monday, February 2, NPD could not confirm whether the phone lines were fully back up and functional. Kelly Corns with the police department said that she wasn’t sure if the issues were fixed. “It’s hit and miss,” she said.
Clark Reddaway at Builders Industrial Supply said that the store’s landlines, which are through GCI, went out Thursday, January 22. The credit card machine, which runs off the landline, wasn’t working when he came in Thursday morning. Still, he didn’t pay it much mind. Small outages aren’t uncommon. When he tried to make a call later that day, the continuous beeping on the line let him know there was an issue.
On a typical day, Builders sends two to four orders out on Bering Air to customers in the region, six days a week. The only way for customers to call in those orders is through their landline. The store has two lines they can answer calls on. “It’s very, very, very, very, very common that we would have line one and line two being used at the same time,” Reddaway said.
On January 29, he fixed the issue by rerouting landline calls to a cell phone that he had to buy. “This solution is not a permanent fix,” said Reddaway. “It’s a band aid.”
On Monday, February 2, Builders reported that their landlines were working again.
Sandra Rowe, the owner of the Nome Animal House, said that their landlines, also through GCI, were completely down from Wednesday, January 21 through February 2.
She said that the phones went down during their monthly vet clinic, which was bad timing. “We have all these advertisements out saying our vet is in town, but not everyone knows our alternate numbers,” she said. “I’m sure there are people that missed out on seeing the vet.”
Rowe said that because the landlines are run through a GCI business account, they could not turn to the GCI office in Nome for help. Instead, they had to call GCI’s corporate number. “They kept telling us, ‘We’ll send someone over, we’ll send a technician over,’ and then nothing,” she said.
After a while, she got fed up and went to the local GCI office anyways. “They told me, it’s not a problem with our phone, that it’s a problem with something in the system that they’re working on,” she said.
Megan Webb, Senior Director for Corporate Communications at GCI, said Friday, January 30, that GCI was aware of the issue and that technicians were working on addressing the problem. By February 2 just before 2 p.m., Webb said that landline service had been restored in Nome. As of press time, GCI was not able to provide an explanation for the outage.
Nome isn’t the only place that has been experiencing outages. Cora Ablowaluk in Teller said that landlines there have been down for a month, in businesses and in homes. The landlines in Teller are operated through Fastwyre, formerly TelAlaska, which offers broadband and phone lines to customers in Alaska, Louisiana, Missouri, Nebraska and Texas.
Ablowaluk said that her office has reported the issue to Fastwyre, but the problem has not been fixed yet. “It seems like nobody answers their phones because they don’t ring on our end,” she wrote.
Fastwyre had not responded to a request for comment as of press time.