Hurricane Michael caused "unprecedented" damage to Verizon fiber

Nearly 300,000 homes still did not have access to the Internet, telephone, or home television in Florida, Georgia, and Alabama, while telecom operators struggled to repair networks damaged by the Internet. hurricane Michael. According to the Federal Communications Commission, there are over 200,000 wireless and wired households in Florida.

Mobile services have also suffered a lot, with breakdowns affecting about 15% of cell sites in Florida's 21 counties, where the FCC is monitoring hurricane-related failures.

Carriers have made progress in reducing these outages in recent days. Nearly 29% of cell sites monitored in Florida were out of service as of October 11, but the outage rate has almost halved since then.

"Unprecedented" damage to fiber

Nevertheless, operators' efforts to re-establish the mobile service have been hampered by significant damage to the fiber.

"The storm has caused unprecedented damage to our fiber, which is critical to the smooth operation of our network – including many temporary portable assets," Verizon said on its hurricane update webpage.

Verizon said today that its fiber was still suffering further damage due to other restoration efforts:

We continue to work tirelessly on network restoration efforts and have seen progress, although the fiber optic connection – necessary for the operation of cell sites and some mobile assets – continues to be a significant challenge. For example, as soon as the fiber is repaired and the sites resume, we see new cuts as a result of community restoration, such as clearing roads, clearing residential properties, and replacing utility poles.

Verizon said today that "99% of our network is in service in Georgia and 98% in Florida," but these figures appear to be statewide and no longer just disaster areas monitored by the FCC. "[T]most affected area of ​​Panama City, Panama City Beach and surrounding communities [are] continues to experience the greatest impact, "said Verizon.

Verizon has underground fibers and fibers suspended at the poles in the affected areas, according to The Wall Street Journal.

AT & T said today that its network "works well and is almost fully restored in most of the affected areas". AT & T uses mobile cell sites "in many locations in Florida and Georgia" while the carrier is repairing its network.

FCC Claim Report

The FCC has activated its claims reporting system on Oct. 9 and has provided daily updates on outages since the Category 4 hurricane broke on Oct. 10. The latest update, released yesterday, shows that operators still have some way to go to restore service on both mobile networks and wired connections to people's homes.

More than 66% of the cell sites (216 out of 327) in Bay County, Florida, were absent, while more than 69% of the cell sites (16 out of 23) in Gulf County, Florida, were missing. # 39; were. In the 21 Florida states reporting to the FCC, 383 cell sites out of 2,543 (15.1%) were out of service.

In Georgia, 2% of cell sites in monitored areas were out of order yesterday, compared with 14.2% on 11th October. The breakdown rate yesterday was 50% in Georgia County, Early County, and over 18% in Decatur County. In Alabama, 1.1% of cell sites in monitored areas (8 out of 759) were absent yesterday, compared to 9.2% on 11 October.

While the number of cell site outages provides a rough proxy for the impact of the storm, the FCC said the statistics "do not necessarily reflect the availability of wireless service to consumers in this region."

"Wireless networks are often designed with many overlapping cell sites that offer maximum capacity and continuity of service, even when an individual site is unusable," the FCC said. Carriers also frequently use temporary facilities such as mobile cells to maintain service in the affected areas.

Chartered cable customers still lack service

Most home-based Internet outages are in Florida, where 205,643 cable or wireline subscribers remained out of service yesterday. Cable and cable failures affect the Internet, the telephone and the television service. Power line outages in Florida peaked on October 12 when 252,748 households were affected. Many of the failures affect Charter Spectrum's customers.

"Our technicians are working on restoring the Spectrum service interrupted by damage caused by Michael," Charter said. "Power outages continue to affect many of our customers, and electricity is needed before we can restore or troubleshoot the Spectrum service, and restoration will be ongoing as conditions permit."

Nearly 70,000 Georgian households still had no cable or wireline service yesterday, compared with 103,775 on 11 October. Nearly 16,000 households in Alabama were still out of service yesterday, compared with 18,244 on October 11.

Disclosure: The Advance / Newhouse partnership, which owns 13% of Charter, is part of Advance Publications. Advance Publications owns Condé Nast, who owns Ars Technica.