Extreme weather is increasingly damaging to telecom networks, forcing the industry’s major providers to take costly emergency measures
, the Vancouver-based telecom shipped a number of portable towers for cellphone service to Edmonton. The following month, when a raging fire forced the closing of the major east-west route on Vancouver Island, the company rerouted one of those towers to provide connectivity to a remote area being used as a detour.
In some instances, maintaining service requires Herculean efforts, including flying in generators on helicopters, bringing in portable cell towers on trucks and predicting the spread of wildfires so that fire retardant can be applied to telecom equipment at the right time. Telus, meanwhile, has spent more than $110-million over the past five to six years on responding to climate change and mitigating its effects. The Vancouver-based telecom has invested in generators and solar-powered cell towers, lifted central offices in flood-prone areas and cleared brush to prevent fires from burning its equipment. It’s also added redundancy in what’s known as the transport portion of its network – the large conduits that serve as highways carrying data across the country.
The situation is likely to get worse as rising greenhouse gas levels make severe storms more frequent and cause sea levels to rise. One 2018 paper by researchers from the University of Oregon and the University of Wisconsin-Madison predicted that in the United States, 4,067 miles of fibre-optic conduit will be under water in the next 15 years.
“The internet is the world’s most valuable resource,” said Mr. Theodore, whose firm promotes standards and certifications relating to internet resiliency. Some areas that used to experience floods once per half a century now see two floods per decade, said Mr. Moore. That’s forced telecom providers to relocate some of their infrastructure.
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