I planned to write about Trona and Searle Valley today, but not with earthquakes in mind. Instead, I was going to look at a recent California Public Utilities Commission ruling that, in effect, disavowed a previous and pusillanimous decision to deny broadband infrastructure grants in those two towns. That’s for later. For now, it’s about the eastern California communities that got state and federal broadband grants and, as a result, maintained modern, gigabit-class broadband connectivity even as two major earthquakes – 7.1 and 6.4 magnitude – and a continuing swarm of fore and aftershocks hit.
After chopping out Trona and Searle Valley, the CPUC approved a 2016 California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) grant for fiber-to-the-home infrastructure in three other small towns in the Ridgecrest area, Randsburg, Johannesburg and Red Mountain. Race Communications built and now runs those systems, which continued to deliver gigabit service despite this weekend’s shaking, according to chief technical officer Carlos Alcantar.
Race’s last mile service was supported by Digital 395, a 500+ mile middle mile fiber network that runs from Reno, down the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada, to Barstow, linking communities along U.S. highway 395 to major east-west fiber routes. It was also funded by grants from CASF, and from the 2009 federal stimulus program.
“The network did great, and was a critical lifeline for the hospital”, said James Suver, CEO of the Ridgecrest Regional Hospital and a Digital 395 board member.
According to Michael Ort, CEO of Praxis Associates/Inyo Networks, which built and operates Digital 395, the many public safety agencies, utilities and telecoms companies that rely on it stayed connected throughout the weekend…
We lost commercial power, but went to battery and generator in Ridgecrest. We’ve had other earthquakes, but nothing like this…
We also continued to beef up the reliability of the network as we learned about weaknesses: north-south redundancies, redundant routing up the central valley, multiple service providers feeding in and out of the network…
The fact that there was-real time international news coverage of the event (internet, TV video) is because it travelled on our network. I got a text from a friend in Paris within 10 minutes, asking if we were okay, which is a testament on how fast information travels today.
Reliable communication infrastructure and service is an absolute requirement for effective disaster response and recovery. By all accounts, emergency services in Kern and San Bernardino counties performed flawlessly this weekend. Without these two CASF-subsidised fiber projects, the story might have been different.
Update 10 July 2019: added quote from James Suver.