Extreme weather is increasingly damaging to telecom networks, forcing the industry’s major providers to take costly emergency measures
Across the country, events related to extreme weather are increasingly damaging or threatening telecom networks, forcing the industry’s major providers to take costly emergency measures and devote more resources to keeping the nation’s communications infrastructure intact.“It’s unprecedented for us to jump across the Canadian map for wildfires the way we have,” said Phil Moore, Telus Corp.’s vice-president of emergency response and business continuity.
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. This year, Bell has already seen $8-million of costs relating to weather events, and that doesn’t include the wildfires, which have impacted parts of its fibre-optic network as well as four cellular sites in Nova Scotia. “The impact of the wildfires themselves is not yet costed, but it’s going to be several million dollars, based on what we’re seeing,” said Marc Duchesne, Bell’s vice-president of corporate responsibility.
Outages impacting crucial telecom services are becoming increasingly frequent, according to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. And half of the service disruptions reported to the regulator since the requirement took effect on March 8 were caused by weather-related events, the CRTC said.
Despite how critical connectivity has become, the impact of climate change on telecom networks has received little attention according to David Theodore, the chief executive of Resilient Internet. That playbook includes liaising with multiple levels of government and provincial agencies to co-ordinate a response. The telecom also has an emergency management operating committee comprised of about 80 vice-presidents and directors from across the company who are brought together during natural disasters and other crises. This year marks the first time that the committee, which is chaired by Mr. Moore, has been activated for multiple weather-related events at the same time.
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