Hurricane Sandy shows cost of storms, resistance of underground fibre

Three weeks after Hurricane Sandy ripped through the mid-Atlantic and Northeastern United States, Verizon Communications Inc. and other U.S. telecom providers continue to spend millions of dollars to replace damaged and destroyed infrastructure. The lessons they’ve learned could spare Canadian telecom providers from suffering similar damage as a warming planet results in stronger storms, analysts say. Sandy, which touched down in the U.S. the morning of Oct. 29, caused an estimated $20 billion US in property damage across 24 American states, including what one Barclays analyst estimated as $600 million US in repair and clean-up related costs for telecommunications providers. It also disrupted telecom services and further cost telcos and cablecos that provided refunds for affected customers. Bill Kula, director of communications for Verizon’s wireline services, said the main issues affecting the company’s service after Sandy included flooded Internet transmission boxes and central offices, downed aerial fibre and copper cables, and, in many cases, a lack of electrical power for modems, set-top boxes and equipment in subscribers’ homes. In a backgrounder emailed to The Wire Report, he said the company, as of Monday, completed more than 469,000 repairs related to the storm, “not including thousands of cables and poles replaced.” The backgrounder said Verizon purchased 8,500 poles to hang its aerial wires and to replace poles knocked down by the storm. The company purchased 50,000 fibre “drops,” or installations, as a result of the storm and “laced enough cable and wire to stretch from NY to LA,” a distance of nearly 4,000 kilometres. David St. John, head of public and media relations for the non-profit organization Fibre-to-the-Home Council Americas, said a lesson from the storm for Canadian providers is that it pays over the long term to bury cables, even if it’s cheaper to hang them in the short-term. “You kind of wonder, what are the risks that a provider faces in terms of having all that exposed stuff?” he said. “What are the costs to burying? What are the challenges to burying?” Bob Robichaud, a warning preparedness meteorologist at Environment Canada, said the Atlantic Ocean is in a “hyper-active hurricane period,” causing a rising number of hurricanes and tropical storms in Atlantic Canada. In a typical year, the Atlantic would have an average of 12 storms, while in recent years that has climbed to 28. Robichaud said the hyper-active period started in 1995, and is expected to last another five to 15 years. Storms are expected to be more powerful than they were a couple decades ago, he said. “The general consensus now is that, with climate change, you could see storms being five to ten per cent stronger than they would be ,” he said, adding that it is “certainly difficult to quantify” due to the difficulty of accurately comparing multiple storms across multiple locations and years. RBC analyst Drew McReynolds said in a telephone interview that providers should take a “longer-term view” when assessing infrastructure costs “from a disaster-recovery scenario.” He said most providers keep their infrastructure costs off the public record due to their competitively sensitive nature. As part of a dispute over who should pay the costs of burying overhead wires in the Toronto area’s York Region in May, Rogers Communications Inc. said it is more than 5.5 times as expensive to bury cables than it is to suspend them. Telus Corp. spokesman Shawn Hall said his company has a “strong preference” to bury its lines to protect them from weather-related disruptions, despite the higher costs up-front. Even buried infrastructure is “not impervious to the weather,” he said in a phone interview, and can face disruptions, particularly after heavy rains and flooding. Kula said one of the most valuable lessons Verizon learned from Sandy is that fibre networks can better handle water than other wireline infrastructure. “The saving grace that we have from fibre is that it is much more impervious to water than is copper,” he said. “So, even though we had some of our cable vaults inundated with water from Hurricane Sandy’s flooding, we did not have to have a wholesale mass replacement of the fibre equipment just because it was covered in water for several days. We’re able to continue using that fibre because of its resilience.” Kula said Verizon is replacing cable lines downed by Sandy with the more resilient fibre lines in an effort to modernize its network and prevent future weather-related outages. Fibre infrastructure is easier to repair than Verizon’s “decades-old copper network,” he said, which typically requires an on-site technician to determine where a problem has occurred and how to fix it. With fibre, most repairs can be done remotely, he said. “There’s many consumer reasons for the merits of fibre, but one of the corporate benefits of deploying a 100 per cent fibre-optic network is the long-term cost reduction for us to maintain and repair the fibre network,” Kula said. Hall said Telus has built redundant connections into its network to ensure that a single damaged cable isn’t capable of disrupting services over a wide geographic area. He said the company prepares for weather issues by ensuring vital connections have backup generators so they do not lose power and that extra technicians stand by during storms. “Redundancy is a key part of it. Burying cables is a key part of it. But you have to have a comprehensive approach,” Hall said. “Hurricane Sandy wasn’t an issue for us, but we were prepared for it.” Sarah Levy-MacLeod, a spokeswoman for BCE Inc. subsidiary Bell Aliant, which in Atlantic Canada operates North America’s second-largest fibre-to-the-home network, said in an emailed statement that protecting the company’s fibre infrastructure is a “high priority.” “We are constantly looking for ways to make our network even stronger and less susceptible to damage from weather,” Levy-MacLeod said. “We’re no strangers to harsh weather, and over the years, we’ve gained the skills and expertise as a company to deal with pretty much anything Mother Nature throws at us.” Levy-MacLeod said Bell Aliant factored issues such as maintenance costs in the roll-out of its fibre-to-the-home network, though she did not say whether this includes weather-related maintenance and repair. She said “close to 100 per cent” of Bell Aliant's fibre cables are hung from aerial poles. Kula said Verizon will continue to hang its fibre as it cleans up and repairs its networks after Sandy. “We’re always going to have a combination of below-ground and above-ground conduit. We’ll never be 100 per cent of either one,” he said. “It is more expensive for us to bury the fibre.” nkyonka@thewirereport.ca --- CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misspelled Bill Kula's name.

Hurricane Sandy shows cost of storms, resistance of underground fibre

News | November 22, 2012

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Hurricane Sandy shows cost of storms, resistance of underground fibre

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