Internet Phones: Time to Get Real
New Zealand, Cyclone Gabrielle and Internet phone connections.
Cyclone Gabrielle hit the North Island of New Zealand late Sunday evening, February 12, 2023, with devastating consequences of huge rainfall, flash flooding, washed out roads and bridges, and, most importantly, severely disrupted communications.
Actually, I should say: there are no communications, full stop.
The latest news round-up can be found here via the BBC on-line: Cyclone Gabrielle: Three dead after New Zealand declares state of emergency
Whilst this very Kiwi, or New Zealand, disaster has been completely overshadowed by the infinitely larger tragedy of the earthquake in Turkey and Syria, it has brought to light a problem that one day may affect us all : complete and total loss of communication, both Internet and phone.
In 2022 the old New Zealand Telecom network provider (now, confusingly, split in two companies called Chorus and Spark) announced they would be phasing out their existing copper cable based phone connections for fibre optic cable.
So far, all good, as they say down under. At the time.
Fast-forward to March last year, a month after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and here in Switzerland, where I am now resident, a debate had regarding the viability of mobile phone networks in the event of a prolonged power outage. At a time when many experts were of the opinion, we were going to experience prolonged power outages due to the cut-off of supplies of Russian liquid natural gas supplies (LNG).
In Switzerland, there was concern mobile phone towers had only a few hours' battery backup time if the main electricity grid went down. More importantly, most, if not all, of the emergency communication networks may also be effected. This would include mobile phones, SMS messaging systems and a large percentage of the old so-called ‘fixed line’ connections, that were in fact no longer actually fixed to the old copper cable connections.
They had been replaced by fibre optic cables connected to, guess what? The Internet, which in turn sends not insignificant amounts of its data traffic via mobile phone networks.
Back to New Zealand, where my elderly parents, both in their 90s, live on the East Coast of the New Zealand North Island. Our family is dispersed across the globe, with my sister in Singapore, myself in Europe and another brother in the UK. Fortunately, my younger brother lives about 20 minutes from them by car, only in a rural area, so we have no idea yet if he has been able to reach them.
Wherever we are, all of us depend on the Internet to connect and maintain voice and visual contact with our families or whanau, as the extended family is called in New Zealand. This, as we all know, has grown to be the norm. Contact with loved ones via WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and all the rest of those wonderful Internet enabled communication apps.
But here’s the thing: little do we realize that many of those landlines are not really landlines any longer, and have become Internet dependant, with t old house phone is now connected to the Internet fibre optic network. And suddenly, this dependency is a big deal.
Ninety-year-olds do not (in general) have smartphones (or at least mine don’t), and so depend on the good, old-fashioned fixed line phone for ALL their communications. Remember that one, still sitting on the kitchen bench-top in those old folks houses?
The effects of Cyclone Gabrielle caused the main fibre optic cable to be severed in four places. This cable connect the East Coast to the rest of New Zealand, and the World.
All communication of ANY type has been lost.
In Zimbabwe, where I grew up, load shedding or power cuts, happen with depressing frequency every day, with outages lasting hours and sometimes days. The phenomenon has now spread to South Africa and has nothing to do with cyclones, wars or even earthquakes, but all to do with what is called State Capture — a very complex subject outside the scope of this post.
However, mobile phone networks in these countries keep functioning in spite of the prolonged electric power outages. How? Diesel generator back up, and very cheap labour. Essentially, each mobile phone tower has a generator that kicks in when the power goes down, overseen by a guy who sits next to it all day and all night making sure the generator works and is topped up with fuel.
An African solution to a problem that has plagued Southern Africa for decades, and one that we, here in Europe, have not even started to really think about.
As I write, there is still no phone contact with the effected areas of New Zealand, 5 days after the cyclone hit. Hard for us oversea, but I can only imagine even harder for the local emergency service guys.
Wake-up call, everyone.
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Update: limited connectivity (basically Messenger only) has come back since yesterday via Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite network (yes, the man, again!). Only New Zealand is not Ukraine, and to scale the service costs serious money.
