Issue 14, February/March
FOCUS NEWS FOCUS
THE COST OF BRISBANE’S FLOODS
For Brisbane-based telecommunications companies the real cost of the flood is still unknown but many are putting it in the tens of millions of dollars. By Yevgeniy Sverdlik and Penny Jones
D
ata center providers in Brisbane were well prepared for the floods that devasted the city mid January but
telecommunications companies weren’t so lucky. Estimates show the bill for one telco alone could be more than A$50m for the three-month clean up and work required to get all networks back to their previous conditions
Queensland energy provider Energex said more than 110,000 customers had been affected by power outages since the flood, which occured when the Brisbane river, which winds its way around the city, broke its banks. Many of these were business customers.
Local data center providers contacted by DatacenterDynamics, however, observed few instances of prolonged downtime among their Brisbane peers, with many affected data centers successfully switching to generator power.
Although hosting provider New Sprout’s data center is located outside Brisbane’s central business district (one of the most heavily flooded areas), the company experienced a period of downtime that lasted about five minutes because of an outage at a facility that was part of its network.
“One of our upstream providers goes straight through the central business district,” Gavin Payne, managing director at New Sprout said. “Some of our uplinks were affected.” Service was restored as soon as New Sprout switched to a different upstream provider.
Large Australian telecom AAPT was one of a few data centers that suffered an outage. In a statement issued after the floods it said it had experienced problems with a number of its fiber routes between Sydney and Brisbane. The company’s technicians had been moving equipment out of those sites. AAPT representatives could not be reached for comment.
Brisbane-based data center operator iSeek,
which has three data centers in the capital including a new facility based not far from
the mouth of the Brisbane River at Brisbane Airport, had been preparing for the worst. the compnay’s corporate communications manager Peta Joynson told DatacenterDynamics iSeek had ensured its Cummins diesel generators were fuelled up and ready “should the power be cut”.
“Things are looking quite grave here in
Brisbane,” Joynson said before the flood waters rose.
“The flood waters have inundated thousands of homes and businesses. One never really believes that a crisis of this magnitude can ever happen. It is quite surreal looking at the media coverage and the flood devastation. The main thing is our family is all together and safe.”
HOW TELCOS AND WATER DON’T MIX
Estimates show the bill for one major Australian telcommunications provider Telstra alone could be more than A$50m.
From power outages to severed fiber connections, the job is huge. Facilities, from distribution centers to substations, need to be deemed safe before staff can get close enough to carry out any work. Outside of Brisbane, in the towns where the floods hit worst, services are expected to take even longer to repair.
Telstra director of service delivery for Brisbane’s northern region John Parkin said it would take four days to get its services provisionally running. A number of its mobile base stations and telephony exchanges were being powered only by battery backups and diesel generators following the floods.
Telstra had 262 telephony exchanges providing essential communications services declared as “red zones”, meaning technicians were not allowed to enter to repair damage.
“We have a disaster here that spreads across the equivalent size of France and Germany together and we have a large population,” Parkin said. “We are providing temporary power solutions to our sites but when emergency services can’t get there then neither can we.”
Brisbane’s 2011 flood. Images by Linda Young
To put things into scale, Optus director of fixed engineering Noel Jarrett told The Australian newspaper that the damage caused by the floods was much worse than that caused by Victoria’s Black Friday bushfires, which razed towns in 2009.
Repairs in Brisbane, according to Telstra spokesman, will cost tens of millions of dollars. Telstra’s repair bill alone is estimated to be about A$50m. In some cases, it could take three months for services to be back to normal.
ISP providers were also affected when a cable linking Sydney to Brisbane was cut. Internet service providers, including Internode and iiNet, had to run broadband services using a non-redundant network configuration, pushing traffic over a single link. They said the break was not causing packet loss but damage to the remaining diverse fiber route could cause severe broadband issues.
See more articles at
http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/apac
www.datacenterdynamics.com 15
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72