We do use satellites to communicate to the south, but we can't do that from Alert because Alert is so far north. It's around the curvature of the earth from where any geospatial satellites are, so we have a series of microwave radio towers that go down the spine of Ellesmere Island to Eureka, where we can just see the global geostationary satellites.
On February 18th, 2015. See this statement in context.