Industry Spotlight: Toptana Technologies’ Tyson Johnston

One of the more intriguing projects people are talking about these days is Toptana Technologies’ plans for a cable landing station on the West Coast of the United States. Toptana is a first-of-its-kind indigenous-owned internet infrastructure and technology company, owned by the Quinault Indian Nation (QIN) of the Pacific Northwest, a community of more than 3,000 tribal members located along the coast in northern Washington State. Its mission is to connect the digitally unconnected and provide internet access to rural communities, starting by bringing the first subsea cable landing station to Washington State in over 25 years. The team is currently building necessary backhaul network connectivity to Seattle and major data center clusters in Hillsboro, Oregon.  Today we talked about the company’s plans and its underlying motivation and outlook with Tyson Johnston, who serves as Toptana’s chairman of the board.

TR: What is your background and how did you get involved in the digital infrastructure sector?

TJ: I’m a Quinault tribal citizen here at the Quinault Indian Nation. Currently, I’m the Executive Director of Self-Governance for the Quinault Tribe as well as chairman of the board for Toptana Technologies. Previously, I served in an elected capacity for the nation for 10 years. For the latter six I was the nation’s vice president. At that time I was overseeing some pretty big policy bodies of work for the tribe, and one of those was expanding our technology capacity and infrastructure in order to have better connectivity on the reservation. Tribes as organizations are huge. We’ve only grown and grown as we’ve retained our autonomy and been able to build our own nations back. That growth has led to a need for top-quality infrastructure for our citizens. Access to that kind of infrastructure is as essential now as water and electricity are. 

TR: What led to the creation of Toptana itself?

TJ: The nation is really excited about this venture and has a long history of getting into different industries not only for profit but also to benefit our communities. We have a trust relationship with the federal government, but there’s still a lot of shortfalls and Indian programs aren’t really funded at the level required to properly support our communities. So we get into these different sectors to supplement that and bring us into the 21st century. It’s really tied to that overall agenda of the tribe to create economic self-sufficiency and autonomy and have strong nations for our citizens today and tomorrow.

TR: Where are the Quinault Indian Nation and the landing station project located?

TJ: We are on the northwestern coast of Washington State on the Olympic Peninsula, and we have been here since time immemorial. Indian land is a very complicated issue. It’s interesting where parcels have ended up because of artifacts of all the federal policy and land issues.  Our reservation itself has 27 miles of Pacific Ocean coastline, but our ‘Usual and Accustomed’ territories are much greater than that.  We have management and co-management responsibilities in the ocean and the river systems and all the forests within our territory. The reservation is a major parcel where most of our village sites and population centers are located, but we also have properties speckled nearby and all around the reservation, including the area where the cable landing station is being constructed in Ocean Shores, Washington in this place called Hogan’s Corner.

TR: What drove the idea of building a cable landing station in this location?

TJ: It was driven by us. Toptana Technologies is a tribally chartered company. After just dealing with these harsh realities that we live with, I have learned things about important initiatives. When you look at what they call the ‘Digital Divide’ in what I call Indian countries, it is vast compared to many other communities even in rural parts of the United States. There are a myriad of reasons, but a lot has to do with jurisdiction. When you get onto Indian reservations, it becomes a jurisdictional hodgepodge and a no man’s land. So when you see old fiber build-outs, that infrastructure usually stops short of Indian lands. Here at the tribe, we’re the largest employer and the largest purchaser of goods and services in our county. We have the most employees. We just don’t have infrastructure to support all these different things that have become essential. Through the pandemic, especially, that became apparent when education became at-home overnight. We had to move our workforce through telecommunications, and we just weren’t able to properly support that. Those realities are what moved us into this lane of investing in this infrastructure ourselves. After we learned about the importance of the subsea cable industry and what that could mean for bringing new connectivity to a region, that’s what really pushed the tribe making this a priority.  The last landing of subsea fiber on Washington’s coast happened in 1999.

TR: Did the hyperscalers’ growing need for diversity help create this opportunity for Toptana’s project?

TJ: Absolutely. There is a need for route diversity and new infrastructure to support new networks and their vitality. Globally that need is outpacing any new development that’s coming online. Around three to four cables tend to come online on the West Coast annually, and just the growth and need for that infrastructure to support everything. The advent of artificial intelligence and all these other things that are becoming more common in our society are going to require this infrastructure to support their development and growth. The mission of Toptana is to bridge that gap and provide that opportunity and resource to the industry overall.

TR: It’s one thing to recognize the need, and another to get a foot in the door with the necessary partners.  How did you get attention for Toptana’s plans from the industry?

TJ: It’s been a really great process. As I’ve learned this industry more in depth, I have realized that telecom, information services, and technology is actually a really small, almost niche community. Everybody knows each other. And even though there’s a lot of maximization in Oregon and California as far as the availability for new opportunities, Washington’s coast is wide open right now. There’s just a need for that route diversity and to get folks to the big data center campuses that you see in Seattle and Hillsboro, Oregon. 

TR: What is the current status of the project?

TJ: We’ll be finalizing our north-south network here shortly, which is the fiber that gets us to Seattle and Hillsboro. The east-west network is still under development. And we’ve been developing the property for the cable landing station in Ocean Shores. We are working really hard to move all those different elements forward. It’s a huge project.

TR: Have you been getting any interest from submarine cable projects yet?

TJ: We are in talks with several customers right now that are looking at our site as a landing point: hyperscalers as well as a cable consortia.

TR: Subsea cable projects have their own schedules and timeframes can be maddeningly vague at times. How have you found the process of coordinating your investments with theirs?

TJ: It is definitely eye-opening to see just the sheer amount of planning involved. Every customer we’ve talked to has different timelines and different issues that they’re facing. The permitting element alone is very complicated. Part of the issue has been that unlike Oregon and California, Washington isn’t really streamlined in some aspects for that. But we’ve been working through it. That actually is a unique element of Toptana because the tribe itself has a kind of government-to-government and nation-to-nation relationship with a lot of these different regulatory bodies. We are able to kind of integrate and interact with those agencies in a different way than a typical customer entity would. I feel like that opens more doors and allows the tribe to be able to talk to folks from a different perspective and capacity.

TR: How have the regulatory efforts been going so far?

TJ: We have heard from the upper echelons of government that Washington wants this here. But when you have different entities that regulate the seashore marine area and varying jurisdiction on the beaches, there is interplay between so many different agencies and laws that aren’t really equipped to deal with technology, much less subsea issues. That will probably be taking up a lot of my time, and in this industry time is the most important resource. People that are going to be spending hundreds of millions of dollars to line cables on both sides of the Pacific Ocean need certainty. They need some way to time and scope their development until we kind of get through these regulatory processes with the state and/or the federal government. But I feel really positive about the progress we’ve made, and we’re definitely opening doors and leaving them open as we walk through them. I think it’s going to open a floodgate, that will allow industry to consider the Washington Coast a viable landing site.

TR: Beyond these specific projects under development, what does Toptana have in mind for the future?

TJ: Ultimately, another of the major goals of Toptana technologies is to build a ‘North’ fiber backbone that goes directly to our reservation so we can connect our homes.  Fiber-to-the-Home has been a huge goal of the tribe forever. Right now, we have been able to shimmy together a microwave network that gives us around 30% of what the FCC considers minimum standards. Around a third of our homes on the reservation still have no connectivity whatsoever. Prior to the tribe’s investment in this infrastructure, our whole land base had less connectivity than one single home in Portland or Seattle. That’s how microscopic our bandwidth was.

TR: How might you make that dream into reality? Federal programs?  Public-private partnerships?  Build it yourself? 

TJ: All of the above.  We are looking at whatever gives the tribe its best option and autonomy over the infrastructure. We would love to partner with folks in the industry to bring connectivity to our population centers here but just haven’t had a lot of success with that yet. After this infrastructure exists, maybe those doors will be open more widely. But if not, I think the goal of Toptana is to grow and diversify in the future. I could see us becoming a provider of some sorts.  We want quality of life. We want parity.  We want access in our communities. People really take for granted where telecommunications and the internet comes from. It’s like this hidden thing in the background. Now that we’ve been working in it, my worldview of network infrastructure has completely changed.

TR: Is this something you might be able to expand to or replicate with other tribal groups?

TJ: Definitely. There are several examples across the nation where other tribes are dipping their toe by developing telecom or technology companies. We’re a little unique in that we are one of only four tribes in the country that have adjudicated ocean rights in the Pacific Ocean. So the subsea cable part is probably going to be unique to us. But as far as how we’re leveraging resources and developing networks to connect our villages, I think there’s some things that can be replicated in other communities. So we have been having those conversations. 

There are tribes that are north of us that may have opportunities in this geography like we do.  We also, as tribal people, don’t think in terms of borders the same as everyone else. We have a lot of brothers and sisters in Canada. We’ve even talked to our relatives on the other side of the ocean from Pacific nations and up into Alaska. I think that tribal sovereignty should include things like digital sovereignty or spectrum sovereignty, and that we should be thinking about technology and how it can be leveraged as an asset and a resource. I think that the lessons learned as we grow Toptana as a business will be important for that conversation for all tribes as we move into this modern era.

TR: What else should the industry know about this?

TJ: The tribes in this country are a hidden population, but potentially could be a huge resource for the industry overall. There’s a movement in our country to bring connectivity to all. That’s not going to happen without Indian country at the table. When you look at rural parts of the United States, it’s often an Indian tribe that happens to be the biggest economic base or economic provider in really stressed regions. Technology and broadband is really a utility versus a luxury at this point, and having that equity for all people is going to be really important if we’re going to have the most resilient society and economy.

TR: So what’s the biggest hurdle ahead for you right now? What challenges do you have to overcome to make all this happen?

TJ: We have heard from the upper echelons of government that Washington wants this here. But when you have different entities that regulate the seashore marine area and varying jurisdiction on the beaches, there is interplay between so many different agencies and laws that aren’t really equipped to deal with technology, much less subsea issues. That will probably be taking up a lot of my time, and in this industry time is the most important resource. People that are going to be spending hundreds of millions of dollars to line cables on both sides of the Pacific Ocean need surety. They need some way to time and scope their development until we kind of get through these regulatory processes with the state and/or the federal government. But I feel really positive about the progress we’ve made, and we’re definitely opening doors and leaving them open as we walk through them. I think it’s going to open a floodgate, that will allow industry to consider the Washington Coast a viable landing site.

TR: Yeah. I think maintaining momentum through the time when you’re not actually digging and putting in things is kind of where a lot of projects flounder. So that sounds like where you have to keep that focus going.

TJ: Well, even having opportunities like this with individuals like you, I mean, just the chance to tell our story, I’ve been so thankful that folks have taken an interest in what we’re doing in building this business entity and what our overall vision is for Toptana Technologies. And so just having the chance to share what we’ve learned and get the word out about what we’re doing has opened so many doors and new opportunities, new education, and all of that. And so I’m really thankful for platforms like this to kind of share what we’re doing and what we’re going to accomplish.

TR: Thank you for talking with Telecom Ramblings!

 

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Categories: Industry Spotlight · Undersea cables