Communications Blackout Coming
Posted March 28, 2018 at 5:43 am by Tim Dustrude
Rock Island shares this heads up with you…
ALERT: County-Wide Communications Blackout Coming April 12th
On April 12th from 9:00 pm to April 13th at 6:00 am, the county is going to experience a county-wide communications outage.
The 48-count fiber-optic cable carrying all data and voice traffic from San Juan County for ALL providers is going to be relocated just south of Anacortes at SR-20 and Spur (Sharpes Corner).
WAVE Broadband will be shutting down and re-routing this fiber cable as they implement a traffic change in this area.
More information about the WSDOT construction project at this link
WSDOT’s official release can be found at this link
WAVE Broadband, the owner of the cable, will be performing the work. They have given Rock Island some very vague ideas as to the exact timing of the work. We are currently unsure when the cable will be cut exactly, and which critical fiber links will be connected prior to the work window close.
We hope the actual outage will be well within the 9-hour window, but given the nature of the proposed project, we should all be prepared to see severely constrained services for most of the outage window.
Rock Island will be able to process some communications via microwave links from Mt. Constitution to Bellingham, and from North Blakely to a LTE site on Lummi island. We are also working with our voice partners T-Mobile, Ooma, Jive and to see how we can maintain some level of cellular and digital voice communications around the county during this period.
Why is there no other fiber path in Anacortes for redundancy?
This question has been a concern for Rock Island for some time now. For over 20 years all carriers (CenturyLink, Rock Island, Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, Zito Media, etc.) have relied on this one fiber path traveling through Fidalgo Island. Rock Island has been working with the City of Anacortes and WSDOT to develop a secondary fiber path from the west side of Fidalgo Island all the way to Mt. Vernon. This will give us full carrier and path redundancy and isolate us from problems like this in the future.
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Categories: Technology
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