From a WISP in USVI
A quick perspective from the US Virgin Islands of how the carriers have fared / performed: AT&T = had a couple towers with some cell coverage after Irma and Maria. A testament to good engineering at the tower, and redundancy in their network design. Primarily microwave backhaul, but leasing some fiber from the ILEC named Viya. AT&T has a major undersea cable station and POP on STT in downtown Charlotte Amalie. They have been making progress fixing their network, STX is over 50% fixed 2 weeks after Maria. 75% market share Sprint = 100% down for the 3+ weeks after Irma. They have a single point of failure, relying on 10ft dishes to shoot 20-50 miles, from STT to Puerto Rico. These cheap bastards wouldn’t buy a backup connection from Viya or Broadband VI. I have called them out to the PSC. Still weeks away from anything working. Most of their customers can roam on Viya’s cell network. 15% market share and rapidly declining. Viya = Celluar = 30-50% up, Celluar = 10% market share. Rolling out LTE upgrade. Cable TV/Phone/Internet = 10% up, 75% market share, have a long road to recovery. Have to wait for power company poles to be replaced / fixed before they can repair their badly damaged plant. Broadband VI = WISP = 50% AP's up, 15% of customers. Got up quickly after Irma, STX stayed up, STT had backhaul to every major tower repaired in 5 days. After Maria 100% down. Had to re-aim / repair every major tower on STX, and most of STT. Moving focus from backhaul to repairing AP’s next week. Tower by tower, with installers / subs going to customers in that area (who have power, almost all via generator). In the middle of a Mikrotik 2 Cambium 450 forklift upgrade. Impressive survival rate for Cambium AP’s, and Ceragon IP-20. viNGN = Government fiber middle-mile, lost 90% of their drops because there were aerial. I am off to guide the FEMA re-fuelers to a remote tower which ran out of fuel last night. There have been some lessons learned. I will compile a report in the next few weeks. Mike Meluskey CTO and Founder Broadband VI ----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com Midwest-IX http://www.midwest-ix.com ----- Original Message ----- From: Javier J <javier@advancedmachines.us> To: Jean-Francois Mezei <jfmezei_nanog@vaxination.ca> Cc: nanog@nanog.org Sent: Sat, 07 Oct 2017 03:02:46 -0500 (CDT) Subject: Re: Hurricane Maria: Summary of communication status - and lack of @ Jean Interesting stuff. Please keep this thread updated with info on that initiative. On Fri, Oct 6, 2017 at 9:55 PM, Jean-Francois Mezei < jfmezei_nanog@vaxination.ca> wrote:
I have not ound the official announcements, but the press is reporting that the FCC has granted Google rights to fly 30 of its "Loon" high altitude ballons to provide cellular cervice in Puerto Rico for up to 6 months.
(From my readings, there are glorified relays of ground based signals (which I assume some antennas have to be oriented to face up towards the balloons).
The Loon will use spectrum allocated to the carriers they relay (and got their OK)
Altitude 20km. (so not sure they need 30 balloons, 1 probably suffices to cover all of PR).
I suspect more concrete info will be coming.