A redundancy in fiber networks in Southwest Colorado could have prevented phone and internet outages that left thousands of people disconnected in June.
CenturyLink’s corporate communications representative, Mark Molzen, said in an email last week that the company works “to provide redundancy whenever possible,” but it’s expensive.
The separate outages were a result of five fiber lines being cut.
“Four of the outages were caused by third-party fiber cuts, and one was caused by vandalism – all issues out of our direct control,” Molzen said in an email.
Though CenturyLink sometimes receives funding from the Federal Communications Commission to bring redundancies to rural areas, Molzen said, companies usually don’t see a return on their investment.
CenturyLink is considering placing a new network node in Dolores, which would allow it to reroute services from Cortez, Molzen said, and is exploring diversified routes between Pagosa Springs and Bayfield toward Farmington and Albuquerque. An upgrade to a 10-gigabyte circuit in Pagosa Springs could be in order, too, he said.
The cut in Cortez on June 17 was attributed to a construction crew’s misstep. The line is owned by Tri-State Electric and leased to CenturyLink, according to Abel Chavez, the company’s director of local government affairs. It runs from Grand Junction to Albuquerque and provides the Four Corners with a connection to the rest of the world, said Rick Smith, general services director for the city of Cortez. The outage lasted about seven hours and affected Pagosa Springs, Dolores, Ignacio, Marvel, Cortez, Mancos, Durango, Bayfield and Silverton, Molzen said.
Telecommunications companies aren’t required to disclose where they lay fiber lines, Colorado Public Utilities Commission spokesman Terry Bote said. The commission doesn’t map infrastructure and has no authority to regulate broadband services, he said.
CenturyLink, as a basic emergency services provider, is required to report individual outages when emergency 911 services are down. The commission is working with CenturyLink to identify places where redundancy or diversity is lacking within the company’s emergency 911 network, he added.
Mountain Village, near Telluride, also experienced several outages in June and early July, according to the town’s IT director, Steven Lehane. A 48-hour outage June 17 and 18 was attributed to equipment failures, a line that apparently had been damaged by a bullet on June 10, and by the construction crew’s cut in Cortez, Lehane said.
CenturyLink spokesman Tim Kunkleman on Thursday confirmed the Tri-State fiber line was hit by a gunshot. The line, between Grand Junction and Montrose, was 85 feet above ground.
The outage happened during the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, and some shops couldn’t process credit cards. The town gave local internet customers a 20 percent cable credit, costing about $20,000, he said.
“It was a really bad weekend for that to happen,” Lehane said.
After the gunshot incident, Kunkleman said CenturyLink had moved some traffic off Tri-State lines to CenturyLink facilities, which left some areas around Durango and Cortez more vulnerable. Then, the line was cut in Cortez, exposing those vulnerabilities and leading to the widespread outage, he said.
“It was a crazy, perfect storm,” Kunkleman said.
The fiber cuts also strained 911 dispatches on the Western Slope, said WestCO Dispatch in Montrose, a company that provides 911 service in western Colorado.
Emergency 911 lines went down June 17 for Montezuma and La Plata counties and Ute Mountain and Southern Utes tribes. The calls were routed to the Montrose Sheriff’s Office and relayed to local departments via radio, said Susan Byrne, director of Montrose dispatch communications.
The Montrose dispatch center processed 52 calls from La Plata and Montezuma counties from 3 to 10 p.m. that day, Byrne said, about triple its typical workload. Two extra night-shift dispatchers were called in, and a crew of five handled the increased load, she said.
“Everything was very routine and flowed very well,” she said. “It was exciting for the dispatchers. They were enjoying it.”
