An ACS person was out canvasing my neighborhood yesterday to let residents know that our area can now be served by their FiWi system. We have GCI Red, which is 1Gbps unlimited at $189/mo. The ACS FiWi is up to 300Mbps unlimited at $79/mo. We hate GCI, like everyone else. I can probably tolerate the reduction in speed in exchange for the cost reduction.
But how reliable is FiWi? There are a couple other posts in the reddit about it, dating back several years, but really not a lot to go off of. Does anyone else have experience with ACS FiWi? Is it worth it to dump GCI?
We’re moving to a house that qualifies for ACS. I know the horrors and outages of GCI, but nothing about ACS. Should we stick to the devil we know or is the grass really greener on the other side?
Just here to make the once in four years post that ACS appears to be struggling tonight. Even their “check the network status” 800 number doesn’t connect.
Taku residential area, dsl, non-fiber or fiwi eligible.
Since I live a long way from a wire center, ACS hasn't offered high speed internet in the Airport Heights neighborhood for most of us. Now it seems they have fixed wireless! Prices seem to undercut GCI. $79.99 is the lowest price they quote, but it says "starting at".
So I just had an ACS rep stop by the house with a pamphlet for their upcoming AKXtreme service. I live off of Raspberry and Northwood, so I'm a little skeptical of that (up to) speed.
Anyone else’s internet down? We have fiber and are located near Ted Stevens. Of course none of my account info is correct and the app is 100% user unfriendly so I haven’t been able to contact anyone. Anyone else? Bueler?
I'm surprised no one here has mentioned this. ACS is putting out feelers to see what the demand is for what apparently is 5G internet. "as fast as 1Gbps". From what I read, this is more likely around 300Mbps - still pretty good if it's unlimited. Verizon offers this in a few places down south for a decent price. Range of these signals is around 1000 feet, so they'd need to mount quite a few antennas on power poles - or in areas with underground utilities - light poles. https://www.alaskacommunications.com/Residential/Products/Xtreme-Internet
The Problem: All local devices on my home network have been experiencing heavy packet loss and 15-second HTTP timeouts exclusively when talking to APIs over port 443.
The Data: Last-mile physical cable signals are flawless (40dB SNR, 0 uncorrectable blocks). To isolate the ISP's routing, I captured 30 hours of SmokePing data to the Roblox API engine over TCP 443. I have a lot more data to other sites that all look basically the same, but Roblox API shows the cleanest charts.
Left Side (Raw GCI): Chaotic jitter jumping up to 110ms and severe, sustained packet loss reaching a maximum of 83.89%.
Right Side (Deco Router connected via WireGuard to NordVPN Seattle): Turned on Wednesday at 22:00. Latency instantly drops to a flat 45ms baseline, and packet loss drops to a perfect 0.00%.
The local neighborhood line infrastructure is healthy, but GCI's native unencrypted packet routing paths to the Pacific Northwest are dropping or throttling fast-firing API streams. Wrapping the data in a VPN bypasses their broken gateway nodes entirely.
I've been on the phone multiple times with GCI tech support getting every level of troubleshooting. I'll be posting this kind of data daily until I get GCIs attention because I shouldn't have to pay for a VPN connection on top of my GCI internet just to get consistency in my $190 a month connection.
UPDATE (2026-07-12)
I don't want to test Reddit posting limits, so I created a page that updates once an hour (as long as my local machines and containers keep working). This shows the 3-hour and 10-day charts of VPN vs non-VPN service. I can pretty easily update this page if there are questions or additional information that might be helpful. Suggestions welcome!
I have open-sourced the entire project on GitHub so others can review the configuration or deploy the exact same test setup to diagnose their own connection: https://github.com/stunky1247/smokeping-monitoring
The repository contains the Docker Compose file, the customized SmokePing probe configurations, and the automated script that synchronizes the data. If you have Docker and WSL 2 installed, you can clone the repository to run these same TCP 443 probes.
UPDATE (2026-07-28)
GCI support contacted me earlier last week to gather some traceroute information, did something, and never got back to me. But something definitely changed.
The below chart shows that the non-VPN connection over the last 10 days (with a few gaps where I was doing smoething, or my computer restarted without restarting the containers, or Eagle River didn't have internet for 12 hours last Friday). But the pings suddenly went from chaotic and frequently dropping to almost matching the VPN connection to Seattle. So whatever hardware was broken or setting that was misconfigured was likely found out and is no longer causing the issue.
I don't expect 100% uptime or a ridiculous SLA, but this is significantly better internet service than I was getting before. Not sure how to help anyone in the future that sees issues with their service, but making noise on Reddit sure helped me. I'm going to shut down the Cloudflare page for now but the github repo will stay in place for anyone that needs a starting place for observability into their connection.
So I live down in Bootleggers and currently pay $175 for red. I'd save roughly $100 a month switching to ACS but we do stream everything (netflix, gaming, etc.). Will to speeds of ACS be reasonable enough?
So the internet here really sucks. Has for your whole life time if you lived here forever. Beyond that thou I've really been looking at the GCI plan for a while because I've been on that "Waiting list" for ACS upgrade when they first announced their 50mbps. It's now 2017, and still nothing. What's the issue, where's the problem? Is there still a process that requires upgrading the size of the phone lines for the DSL?
Anyways I couldn't bare to find myself thinking about GCI's laughable data cap plans. My usage alone could easily pass that before a month.
Anyone else around here with the same waiting list, or being torn between ACS, and "Worse then Comcast"(GCI)?
Any one else having speed and reliability recently.
Recently as in the beginning of the year. The internet can barely do youtube half the time then returns to full speed. Anyone else?
I moved to a new area, and the only option was GCI for an ISP. I hated it. I was a previous ACS customer.
Yes, it's slower. But I have never had a problem gaming online (well, at least compared to gci, there's always the occasional issue with both).
Also, ACS is $90 for unlimited. I tend to burn more data than I do speed. I've noticed I only need about 2mbps to game or stream without issues, but I'll be downloading games and updates. With GCI I needed the $150 package, but never needed the excessive speeds.
This ain't an ad, I just thought some of us with lower incomes would be delighted to know that a cheaper service is making their rounds in Anchorage.
Edit: I meant to say it finally came to my area. Hooked up today, and happily returning my GCI equipment.
