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Landlines out and switch sites flooded
In the days during and after Katrina, more than a thousand cell sites and multiple switches throughout the Gulf Coast region were rendered inoperable. Then post-storm flooding wiped out landline service and access to power—two key elements for the delivery of wireless service—in some of the hardest hit regions.
In New Orleans, the biggest problem for wireless carriers was the condition of Bell-South’s landlines. Verizon, for example, had built many diverse routes into its network, but since they involved landlines, all the paths were out.The duration of the outage was unprecedented as well. “We’re used to seeing landlines go down during hurricanes but usually in two to five days it’s back 100 percent. Landlines were still getting worse a week after the storm, and we had landlines down two months later,” Leutenegger continues.
“We had to take a totally different approach than we had with any other natural disaster. We had to build our own landline network by putting our stuff together. We deployed hundreds of microwave links and provided primarily unlicensed microwave that we could put up in a short period of time.” Other carriers did the same. To restore and augment wireless service in the hardest hit areas of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, mobile operators deployed more than 100 COWS (Cellular on Wheels) and COLTS (Cellular on Light Trucks).
“In areas where BellSouth lost entire central offices we put up microwave hops to get those cell sites back on the air as quickly as we could. We couldn’t do it everywhere, but we did it in many places, and in the locations where we couldn’t do it there were no people there anyway,” says Dave Green, Alltel’s Vice President Network, Southeast.
Some carriers lost other key elements of their network. “We lost a switch location in downtown New Orleans when it got totally flooded,” says Greig Fennell, Sprint Nextel’s Director of Business Continuation. This switch provided long distance service for the Florida panhandle, much of the gulf coast of Mississippi and Alabama, and portions of Louisiana as well. “It was a fairly significant loss for us. This took an engineering feat of redirecting everything that was located on that switch to other areas outside the New Orleans location.”
Because it couldn’t get to its switching centers at first, due to security and access issues, Alltel began to deploy a temporary switch on wheels (SOW) in Baton Rouge. “The logistics of activating a SOW are much more complex than a cell on wheels (COW), but we took the necessary steps and were ready to cut over to it if the need arose,” says Green. Alltel was finally able to access its regular switch locations, so the backup was never required.
Even when cell sites were up and running, getting fuel for the permanent and portable generators posed another challenge. ”We had fuel delivered to the area prior to the storm, but it was not enough and it was difficult to get additional fuel brought in. Even weeks after the storm there was a fuel shortage all the way up past Atlanta,” Leutenegger adds.
“We even secured a helicopter to deliver fuel to a cell site,” says Josh Lonn, Regional Director for the South, T-Mobile.
Cingular's Tina Brown, Director of Continuity Planning and Crisis Management, and Kevan Parker, Director of Emergency Response, stand in front of one of Cingular's new mobile command centers. MACH, Mobile Access Command Headquarters, is equipped with generators, a satellite dish for constant communications, LAN connectivity, and a PBX phone system.