Dawson Creek contractor created latest service woes

They say bad things happen in threes, and Northwestel Inc. is hoping its third significant service outage in a week will be the last for a while, says Anne Kennedy, the company's director of communications.

They say bad things happen in threes, and Northwestel Inc. is hoping its third significant service outage in a week will be the last for a while, says Anne Kennedy, the company’s director of communications.

In the past seven days, Northwestel’s customers have experienced repeated disruptions in their cellphone, Internet, data and voice services after fibre-optic cables used to carry Northwestel telecommunications traffic were damaged on three separate occasions.

“We’re certainly aware of how it affects business. We know it’s really frustrating for everyone,” said Kennedy.

During road construction around 11:40 a.m. Tuesday, city crews in Dawson Creek, B.C. severed a fibre-optic cable belonging to Bell Canada, which affected customers in the Yukon, the Northwest Territories and northern B.C.

Although the incident occurred outside of Northwestel’s operating area, northern customers were unable to use their cell phones and make phone long-distance calls to the South.

Long-distance phone services within Northwestel’s operating area, local phone services, and the Internet were available, but were slower than normal.

When it heard about the outage, Northwestel took steps to re-route telecommunications traffic to alternate paths and systems.

“We were able to talk to Telus and Bell and find other facilities that they had available that were able to carry our traffic,” said Kennedy.

Bell began making repairs around 4:30 p.m. and all services were restored by 9:45 p.m.

Last Wednesday, a clearly-marked fibre-optic cable owned by Northwestel was damaged by contractors at M’Clintock River Bridge, which knocked out voice and data services to Yukon customers.

Last Sunday night, a controlled burn near the Smith River forest fire in northern B.C. melted a cable, also owned by Northwestel. That rendered customers unable to make long-distance phone calls to the South, and their cell phones and Internet were also disrupted.

“There’s really nothing we can do,” Kennedy said about preventing the repeated outages.

Kennedy say the company has constant communication with construction companies, issuing warnings about digging in areas where Northwestel has cables, but incidents still happen.

In the case of the severed Northwestel cable at M’Clintock River Bridge, Kennedy says the contractors were fully informed of its presence.

The way to the impact of the outages would be to build duplicate infrastructure to carry traffic when their main lines go down, but that is option is cost prohibitive, says Kennedy.

“It would be like putting in a second Alaska Highway” to re-route traffic when there’s a fire on the highway, said Kennedy.