It didn’t have to be this way. The storm damaged only two of the 185 mobile towers that were offline throughout the country post-Gabrielle. The rest were fine, they were just out of juice.
Though fibre-optic cables around the region were damaged, one Chorus cable remained intact.
As power was restored across the region, mobile service returned.
New Zealand’s mobile operators have a strategy for dealing with service outages. They equip towers with a few hours of battery back-up and stock portable generators at depots around the country. They even have portable towers ready to go. Power outages and tower damage are met with trucks and trailers.
This strategy works well – when roads are in good condition, generator fuel is available and outages don’t affect more than a handful of towers.
Cyclone Gabrielle in 2023, Taiwan’s Hualien earthquake last year and the fires in Los Angeles in January are all examples of where this strategy fails.
When natural disasters strike, power outages are often widespread, fuel is in high demand and roads and bridges often impassable.
Where these disasters differed is in how mobile networks were prepared to cope. Many of Taiwan’s remote towers along their earthquake-prone east coast were equipped with 72 hours of back-up power. Its government has regulated and subsidised telecommunications resilience for more than 10 years.
Mobile towers in fire-prone areas of California have had 72 hours of back-up power since 2021. The California Public Utility Commission regulated that level of resilience in 2020 and gave carriers 12 months to comply.
Governments around the world, including those in Finland, Germany, Japan, and Sweden, have recognised the importance of mobile communications for disaster response and have required mobile carriers to prepare.
As they should.
It’s a fact that the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events are on the rise, even if we don’t all agree on the cause. Earthquakes are an ever-present risk around the Pacific Rim.
The price of resilience
I’ve been building resilient telecommunications systems for 20y years. Infrastructure I designed has been installed at airports, defence bases, hospitals and power stations throughout New Zealand.
In Hawke’s Bay I’ve built broadband on 10 of the region’s Landcorp stations, built ship location services used by the port, planned rural fibre for Centralines, and engineered radio licences for five of the region’s wireless service providers.
When I made a comprehensive study of the region’s telecommunications infrastructure, working with Hawke’s Bay Regional Economic Development Agency and Hawke’s Bay Regional Recovery Agency, I wasn’t surprised at the vulnerability caused by fibre providers all sharing the same roads and bridges.
I knew I was going to find single points of failure across the region, and I did. Resilience is an expense for service providers that doesn’t contribute to the bottom line.
What I didn’t expect was the low levels of back-up power across the region. I honestly thought important rural and remote towers would have a day or two of standby batteries and solar or a fixed generator installed – because that’s a sensible decision for remote infrastructure.
My recommendation that carriers upgrade to 48 hours of standby battery across the region wasn’t meant to repudiate their strategy of using portable generators; it was to help make that strategy safer for the people of Hawke’s Bay.
It was based on a solid understanding of both the technology and the economics of providing telecommunications services.
The New Year’s Day headline in this newspaper “Cell tower battery plan ‘deemed unworkable’”, based on the response to my report from the Telecommunications Carriers Forum, does a disservice to Hawke’s Bay and to New Zealand.
We know the cost of preparing for disaster and Cyclone Gabrielle gave us a hard lesson on the consequences of not doing it.
If the carriers are not willing to make preparations as they do overseas, it’s time for our Government to require them to do it.
