Most Telecom Networks in Texas, Midwest Back Up After Ike
Telecom networks in Texas and the Midwest were largely recovered Thursday from Hurricane Ike. The storm made landfall Saturday in Texas and affected all or parts of 10 other states all the way to upstate New York. But the hardest-hit communities along the Texas Gulf Coast continued to suffer widespread landline outages.
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Telecom carriers said their efforts remained hindered by widespread electric power outages, and keeping their landline and wireless networks working on thousands of emergency generators has proven a challenge. About 1.3 million customers in Texas and more than 900,000 customers in Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky were still without power Thursday. But utilities said they expect to restore power to all but the most heavily-damaged communities by the weekend. Utilities said devastated parts of Galveston and Beaumont’s Jefferson County may not get power back until early next month.
An estimated 29 percent of the nearly 292,000 homes in the nine Texas Gulf Coast counties hardest hit lacked landline phone service as of Thursday, based on state Public Utility Commission figures. About three-fourths of the 86,200 homes still out in the counties were in Jefferson County and Galveston. The Jefferson County area still had about 32,500 homes without landline. Galveston County had 29,450. Of the other seven counties, Cherokee had the most homes still out, almost 6,700, and the highest proportion, 40 percent.
Fourteen other east Texas counties had one to 10 percent outage rates. Landline service elsewhere in Texas was back to normal, except in a handful of scattered pockets. In roughly a third of the counties in the affected region, mainly those closest to the Gulf, electric outages were still widespread, ranging from 25 percent to more than 90 percent.
The southern Indiana counties affected by Ike had wireline phone service restored to near normal by Wednesday. In Kentucky, there were still about 2,500 AT&T customers in hard-hit areas in suburban Louisville without phone service Thursday. AT&T said its landline phone service was back to normal except for a few scattered areas in northern counties.
In Ohio, Cincinnati Bell said 99 percent of its landlines were back in service Thursday. It had lost about 20 percent immediately after the storm. It said 422 of its 447 wireless towers were back on line Thursday. A spokesman said the remaining towers required action by other carriers who share them. Ohio officials said portions of the Columbus and Dayton metro areas still had scattered landline phone outages Thursday.
The electric outages after Ike caused the most significant national Internet outage in five years, said Renesys, a company that tracks online connectivity. These outages had all been restored by Thursday, except for a couple of isolated trouble spots in Ohio and Texas, the company said. Renesys counted outages in Pennsylvania, Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Kentucky, Illinois and Indiana, in addition to Texas and Ohio. Renesys said the storm brought down more than 400 “autonomous networks,” such as ISPs and universities. Renesys said Ike caused the most Internet failures since the Northeast blackout of 2003, which brought down 2,500 autonomous networks.