It’s that time of year again. Sun transits are interfering with Unalaska’s telecommunication services.

Both TelAlaska and GCI are experiencing disruptions this month because of solar interference. GCI spokesperson David Morris explains what’s going on.

"The sun is directly positioned behind the satellite, and the solar energy of that will overpower the signal between the satellite and the earth station located on earth," says Morris. "That will cause a temporary outage, and it could be a few second. It could be 15, 20 minutes. It just really depends on a number of things. The most important of which is how larger that dish is: the smaller they are, the more of an outage you will have."

He stresses that this happens twice a year, and that it isn’t caused by solar weather activity.

"This is not anything to do with solar flares, or solar winds, or anything like that," says Morris. "This is just the sun lines up directly behind the satellite."

TelAlaska spokesperson Celine Kaplan says the internet outages began October 9 and are expected to continue through October 17. Morris says GCI will be affected over a similar time period, but he did not have a hard end date for the outages.

The outages are regular but brief. They’ve been occurring around lunchtime, and lasting about 15 minutes. During these time periods, customers making long distance calls may also experience some difficulty.

Morris adds that as long as Unalaska is served by a satellite system, customers should anticipate spotty service for two weeks in the fall and two weeks in the winter.

"The only way you’re going to get out of the sun outages is to have a terrestrial connection, and terrestrial in your case is either going to be a fiber optic cable or a microwave system," says Morris.

The next batch of solar outages are expected in February.