It looks like the North Coast’s AT&T customers will be entering the modern era of telecommunications reliability. Next year.
In a letter sent to the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors today, the company said it’s “upgrading the North Coast network to significantly increase the network’s protection against outages or service disruptions caused by fiber damage.” The company has been plagued by a pair of recent outages — the first in September, when someone sliced through a fiber optic line between Ukiah and Hopland, and the second earlier this month, when a CalTrans crew near Fortuna severed the line while clearing a culvert — that have left tens of thousands of customers without cell phone, internet and home phone service. (Those came on the heels of another blackout in October, 2014.)
The outage earlier this month alone impacted an estimated 90,000 customers and had reverberating public safety and economic impacts, prompting North Coast state Sen. Mike McGuire to say, “This shouldn’t happen in 2015.”
In its letter to the board, AT&T expanded on its plan to provide more reliable service by the close of 2016: “AT&T will upgrade the wire centers on the main route of the network in the area by installing new equipment in the central offices and programing that equipment to route traffic over diverse fiber paths. This means that if fiber is cut on one side of the wire center, the equipment will be able to switch and reroute through another path, thereby making the network more resilient and reducing the risk of outages in Humboldt, Lake, Mendocino, Napa and Sonoma counties.”
Read the full AT&T by clicking the PDF below.
This article appears in For Rent.
I hate to be the one to point out the obvious, but none of this will do any good unless AT&T leases, buys or constructs additional fiber routes linking us to the outside world. Software and hardware for automatically switching between redundant networks during an outage is a great idea, but unless you actually have those additional networks to switch between the end result is exactly the same. The fact that they do not mention building a single inch of new fiber lines, leasing fiber capacity from another provider or buying some existing network already out there is incredibly telling. All of the hardware/software upgrades in the world are useless if they are not going to add any diversity to their existing network.
One of the reasons that the fiber optic line is hit so frequently in this area is that it was installed without tracer wire or warning tape in many areas making it difficult for AT&T to properly locate. After calling in locates on one project in Rio Dell AT&T failed to locate the line twice after which our crews inadvertently dug it up. Each could have easily been a break.