28.0°

While each day is growing shorter in terms of the amount of sunlight shining, the strength of the sun may locally become noticeable next week as it aligns with telecommunication equipment on the ground and in space.

"From October 6 through October 19, the sun's powerful rays may cause temporary disruption of satellite-provided cable television, Internet and long-distance telephone service," said David Morris, spokesperson for GCI.

GCI is the state's largest provider of dial-up, cable modem, wireless, digital subscriber line (DSL) and dedicated access Internet services. The company also provides voice, video and data communication services to residential, commercial and government customers.

"We can't predict with certainty it will happen, but if it does, it will be during that time," Morris said.

As to the cause of the problem, rather than a solar flare or the sun flexing its strength in some other way, it is more a matter of alignment related to the autumnal equinox.

"As the sun's path takes it directly behind the satellite and in line with the antenna on the ground, the sun's energy could be stronger than the satellite signal to the earth, resulting in a loss of the signal" Morris said.

These sun outages, also known as transits, affect all satellitte-based communications, and people may experience interruption to telephone calls to and from locations within Alaska, the Lower 48 and Hawaii, and international locations.

"If calling locally or to Anchorage, there likely won't be any problems, but if calling rural Alaska -- Nome, Kotzebue, the Alaskan Peninsula, for example -- you could be affected because rural Alaska is served exclusively by satellite," Morris said.

The length of the outages can vary, but should not exceed five minutes, and land-based services provided via fiberoptics or microwaves should not be affected.

There may also be outages to satellite-delivered cable television, that will come in the form of slow degradation of picture for up to 10 minutes, followed by several minutes of total disruption, followed by the a slow returning of the picture.

"With satellite television, you're usually affected regardless of your provider," Morris said.

While these outages occur twice annually -- every October and again in February as the vernal equinox draws near -- their disruptions are only a small glitch in the system when weighed against other more common outage problems.

"Of the normal calls we would have during this time, less than one percent are affected," Morris said

Instead, outages related to less unusual things than solar alignment are a more common cause of service problems.

"Contractors accidentally digging up cables during construction is still the number one cause of outages," Morris said.

Joseph Robertia can be reached at joseph.robertia@peninsulaclarion.com.