Hurricane Helene Communications Outages Show Need for Greater Network Resilience

Hurricane Helene has devastated southeastern states with its winds and catastrophic flooding, leaving two million people without power and taking most forms of communications offline. As such, the storm has elevated the crucial issue of network resiliency skyward for enterprise IT and service providers.

Some stats put the scope of the disaster into perspective. For example, almost 1.8 million homes and businesses in seven states from Florida to Ohio remained without power on Monday night, according to the website Poweroutage.us, including 643,000 in South Carolina and 480,000 in Georgia.

Once floodwaters subside, the process of restoring power across the vast storm-swept region can begin. The destruction or damage of carrier network infrastructure will also challenge network recovery efforts. Broken and washed away telephone poles will need to be replaced, as will fiber optic cable that increasingly runs across them.

Knocked-out bridges – which carry carriers' physical network media – will present a tall and time-consuming task. Fixing things in the region will take two years, according to one estimate.

The Year of Widespread Outages?

Hurricane Helene joins 2024 communications disasters such as the mysterious cut of three international subsea cables in the Red Sea in February, the business paralysis caused by CrowdStrike, and often nationwide wireless services outages with AT&T and Verizon.

Related:Everyone Has a Service Recovery Plan Until They Don’t

Helene's Cell Service Outages

It started early and quickly worsened, with cell sites damaged or out of commission, leaving the masses without a lifeline. Some of the numbers are startling. Immediately following the storm’s passage, nearly 75% of North Carolina cell sites were out.

Politicians at various levels have expressed their frustration with the hurricane response.

“This is an unprecedented tragedy that requires an unprecedented response,” said Roy Cooper, Governor of North Carolina. His state was arguably hit hardest of all, with the western half in wreckage and rubble (and downed cell sites.)

Outages Demand a More Resilient Network

A resilient network requires regular testing, planning, grooming, and monitoring to ensure it is working optimally. It includes not only route redundancy but diversity, as well – giving traffic multiple alternate routes in case of congestion, according to Zayo, a global service provider.

Network resiliency "requires IT teams to be agile, updating configurations and exploring new technology as needed. A resilient network is one that has backup plans and systems to ensure business continuity in the event of disaster and recovery plans in the case of outages."

Power Off, Power On

“I am not sure there is much businesses can do to avoid losing connectivity in these catastrophic events, as everything is dependent on access to power. No power, no Internet," explained Jeff Heynen, Vice President of Broadband Access and Home Networking for Dell’Oro Group, a market research and analysis firm.

However, in situations where power is still accessible, businesses that are in disaster-prone areas should always consider having a redundancy plan. "First, have your primary fixed line connection, be that fiber or cable, and then consider having a 5G connection as a backup," explained Heynen. More businesses are moving in this direction, and companies like Ericsson/Cradlepoint and Cisco/Meraki provide business class switches and routers that can have both primary and redundant WAN connections for an extra layer of resiliency, he added. SpaceX Starlink can also serve as a backup connectivity option in these situations.

Network Resiliency Checklist

No single or combination of disaster recovery steps will provide full network resiliency and much-desired always-on-services. The following steps, which should be taken with your service providers, can minimize the business pain. They should be revisited periodically.

1) Physical Route Diversity

Ask service providers for the ability to direct your traffic over geographically diverse network routes to avoid a single cable cut putting you out of business, at least until a problem on one route is fixed.

2) Diverse Routing

A popular feature with users of often impacted subsea cables, at the sign of a fault or cut, your traffic is automatically routed over an unaffected stretch in the network.

3) Service Delivery

With the speed and financial advantages of hanging fiber and more on telephone poles, instead of being buried underground, you need to evaluate the risk of the infrastructure they use in their delivery networks. Washed away or broken poles can be seen strewn amongst the mess on TV reports on the hurricane damage.

4) Right of Way “Wrongs”

In the race to expand their networks in the past, service providers frequently used the very same rights-of-way under bridges, along train tracks, and such (with the cables from multiple providers bundled together physically. This often gave businesses that used separate carriers in the same area a false sense of security.

5) Explore Media and Non-Terrestrial Services Options

It is worth checking with carriers and other network operators for backup or limited options that can swing into service if the primary means has problems. This sounds smart until you realize that a subsea cable cut cannot be backed up by far lower capacity LEO satellites, as the volume of data sent over undersea cables is immense. If you are not a large multinational, it can help. Businesses should look at all media options and determine which would be the best backup or one of several, if possible.

6) Go to the NOAA

Since many outages are caused by extreme weather, become a dialed-in weather watcher. Enterprise IT can get a jump on menacing weather and space developments by receiving intel from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Months ago, the government group identified solar flares that put on an evening light show for some but also posed a serious threat that would interrupt the use of farming equipment by disabling important machinery. Get their alerts.

7) Explore Dark Fiber Options

Selected service providers, such as Zayo, have a fiber-optic infrastructure that lies dormant. With a lease, the customer, not the service provider, operates and maintains the equipment required to activate the fiber and use it for Internet access and communications. Beyond control, dark fiber offers voluminous bandwidth and often route diversity on land and sea.

8) Old Versus Newer Network Right-of-Way and Paths

As mentioned above, numerous carriers share right-of-way junctures, many of which were built long ago and have been subject to the elements. Checking these key locations might not always be practical for businesses, but nudging service providers to do so might work.

9) Battery Power

Business class equipment often has battery backup for a set period, as do a growing number of networking devices in the home.

10) Check Your SLAs (Service Level Agreements)

It's a good idea to confirm your SLAs with your ISP, as they offer businesses a guaranteed repair interval. Catastrophic situations can trump those SLAs. But they help protect the business and its network uptime in situations where repairs or fixes can be made in a defined period, explained Heynen.

From Hurricane Havoc and Outages to Network Resiliency

The disaster area, which is the vast region hit by Hurricane Helene, has provided service providers a chance to reevaluate their networks as they begin to build back, perhaps better. Concurrently, enterprise IT has an opportunity to reconsider its network planning with network resiliency in mind and to rethink and recast its approach to disaster recovery.