Large scale telco, cable and mobile service outages follow California power cuts

1 November 2019 by Steve Blum
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Cell site outages 28oct2019

Hundreds of thousands of Californians lost their wireline broadband and phone service over the past week, as the state’s major electric utilities cut off power to millions of people in an attempt to prevent wildfires from breaking out. Mobile broadband and telephone subscribers were equally hard hit, with one county – Marin – losing more than half of its cell sites at one point.

The Federal Communications Commission has been tracking wireline and mobile service outages since last Friday, when the power cuts were hitting hard in Pacific Gas and Electric’s northern California territory, and public safety power shutoffs were beginning to bite in the southern California service areas of San Diego Gas and Electric and Southern California Edison. I’ve compiled all of their reports through yesterday into a single document, which you can download here.

From a telecoms point of view, the outages were at their peak on the FCC’s Sunday morning (0830 California time, 28 October 2019) report. At that time 455,000 telco and cable subscribers in 32 counties were without their landline connections and 3.3% of the total number of cell sites were down.

Some counties were hit much harder than others. Marin County lost 57% of its cell sites, while there were no reports of cell site outages in Santa Barbara County. Calaveras, Humboldt, Lake, Napa, Santa Cruz and Sonoma counties lost between 19% and 39% of cell sites.

It’s not clear what the wireline outage figure represents. Participation in the FCC’s disaster reporting system is voluntary. The list of willing companies hasn’t been made public and there’s no way of knowing if all of the telephone and cable companies in those counties are cooperating. The reports from the ones that are cooperating are based on “communications infrastructure status and situational awareness information” and “network outage data”. Which might not include all, or maybe even most, of the households and businesses which are offline because their equipment – cable and DSL modems, for example – don’t have backup power. The network might be fully functional, but if customer premise equipment is down, then service is too.

So that 455,000 customer wireline outage figure might be low.