Nature displays its destructive powers every time a wildfire tears across part of the United States.
While the potential loss of lives or homes is the most devastating part of these disasters, they also take a toll on critical communications infrastructure. During the 2019 Kincade fire, up to 27 percent of the wireless cell sites in California’s Sonoma County were knocked offline. In 2020 yet another wildfire in California’s Bay Area left up to 5,000 residential and 250 commercial customers without wired broadband Internet and Internet-based phone service. When the North Bay wildfires hit the state in 2017, 160,000 wired customers and 85,000 wireless customers lost their service.
These scenarios have become worryingly common. In 2017 Hurricanes Irma and Maria destroyed 80 percent of aboveground broadband fiber and 90 percent of last-mile fiber in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. In 2012 the total number of Internet outages in the U.S. nearly doubled during the four days after Hurricane Sandy caused massive flooding along the East Coast.
The biggest weather-related threats to America’s Internet infrastructure include:
- Floods
- Wildfires
- Winter storms
- Heat waves
- Cold snaps
- High winds, tornadoes, and hurricanes
Severe weather events can disrupt Internet service by:
- Directly damaging network infrastructure (i.e., data centers, cables, or cell sites impaired by high winds, debris, floods, fire, etc.)
- Knocking out electricity that runs the network and the cooling and heating systems that keep it operational
Internet outages during a major weather event aren’t just an inconvenience – they can be a matter of life or death.
Broadband Internet as emergency infrastructure
“911 circuits run across our network. So if one of our broadband sites goes down, you’re not getting 911 calls,” says David Hunt, Zayo’s Manager of Infrastructure Engineering.
During severe weather Internet connectivity, it’s a critical part of emergency communication and response services.
“At times when communities most require essential services for situational awareness and information dissemination, they face the most significant disruptions [during weather-related disasters]. This poses a substantial challenge to both individuals and emergency services, exacerbating an already challenging situation,” researchers at Texas A&M University concluded in a 2024 study.
Zayo’s network resiliency efforts
Zayo’s field ops are incredible because they do whatever it takes, even if they get a call at 2:30 in the morning.
Zayo takes a proactive approach, strategically planning, routing, and building our broadband infrastructure to protect it from potentially catastrophic weather conditions.
- We bury fiber underground to shield it from extreme elements – over 90% of our fiber infrastructure in hurricane-prone Florida is subterranean
- We build on unique pathways not shared by other providers
- Zayo purposely places core network locations near critical buildings like hospitals and airports, which are situated on electrical grids with top priority when power is being restored
- Zayo bakes redundancy into its network by ensuring each broadband route is built with one geographically separated, alternative route in case of an outage
“If you lose a site basically anywhere on that ring, you can still go backward across that path. Either way, with fiber you have alternate paths,” says Hunt.
He adds that Zayo deploys several measures at its sites to prevent broadband outages during severe weather, including:
- Backup generators that can run for at least 24 hours during a power outage
- Batteries that can run a facility for at least eight hours if a backup generator goes down
- Cooling and HVAC systems designed with a minimum standard of N+1 redundancy
- Backup power systems featuring rectifiers with high N+1 redundancy values
While residents hunker down indoors during a bad storm, Zayo’s field operations crews must often venture out into the elements to make sure connectivity continues. When a recent hurricane approached Florida, Zayo field operations team arranged for fuel supplies to keep coming into Zayo’s site to sustain its portable backup generator. Later, Zayo field crews removed downed trees from power lines to help the local utility company restore electricity.
Sometimes extreme weather forces Zayo’s field crews to work extremely long hours and get creative. During a heat wave, crew members at a network site in Spokane, Washington spent almost 24 hours manually spraying water on units to keep them cool and functional.
“At one point we actually had to borrow a hose from a neighbor because we lost our own water at the site,” Hunt recalls. “Zayo’s field ops are incredible because they do whatever it takes, even if they get a call at 2:30 in the morning.”
Zayo’s always looking ahead, trying to build more resilience into our broadband networks for the future. For example, Hunt says Zayo has purchased newer, more heat-resistant air conditioning coils to keep sites running during scorching heat waves.
“We buy all our AC units with extra heavy coils for high temperatures. As opposed to just 90 degrees, we make sure they can withstand at least 115 or 125 degrees,” he says.
It’s just one small part of Zayo’s deepening commitment to plan, design, build, and maintain broadband infrastructure that keeps you – and life-saving emergency services – connected, whatever the weather brings.