Rebuilding With Fiber After a Disaster

When a disaster strikes, communication is the key to recovery. From hiring contractors and filing insurance and FEMA claims, to obtaining needed supplies and medical care, the ability to communicate is essential to rebuilding a community. Therefore, it’s easy to understand that re-establishing cellular, voice, and internet service is typically a top priority in the aftermath of a disaster.

Unfortunately, natural disasters worldwide are on the rise. Climate-change models predict increasingly intense hurricanes, massive droughts, crushing heat waves, and rising seas. To make matters worse, as the global population increases, these disasters have the potential to inflict even more harm.

 

Advance Recovery Planning

Communities are urged to adopt disaster recovery plans in advance and to practice those plans regularly to maximize their effectiveness in the wake of an actual disaster. In terms of telecommunications infrastructure, these recovery plans should include thorough documentation of facilities, cable sizes, duct types, and pole or pedestal numbers, as well as plans, blueprints, and documentation of property rights. This sort of information is nearly impossible to verify after a disaster. Gathering this information in advance will save communities and recovery contractors significant post-disaster time and effort.

 

Rebuilding With Fiber

Post-disaster communications recovery is an excellent opportunity for communities to make the switch from outdated, copper-based communication systems to faster, more secure fiber internet systems. Compared to copper-based systems like telephone wires and coaxial cables, fiber-optic lines can transmit significantly more data at once, and at higher speeds. In most areas, the cost of digging up these existing lines to replace them with fiber is currently too high to justify the benefits. However, when a community must repair or replace its system, the benefits of switching to fiber justify the cost.

Fiber has many benefits for disaster-prone communities. Passive fiber cables are surprisingly damage-resistant. As long as the fiber end faces remain mated, fiber cables can even survive being submerged with little-to-no damage.

 

Protecting Against Future Disasters

Fiber internet offers incomparable data synchronization and storage options for improved data recovery following a future disaster. It’s widely recognized that backing up data to an off-site location is key to getting things back up and running after a disaster with minimal downtime. Real-time data syncing to multiple servers, however, often requires a huge amount of bandwidth, leading many communities to opt for occasional, scheduled backups, which can result in a loss of data. Furthermore, the strain on bandwidth means lengthy recovery times when restoring data from off-site servers.

The unparalleled capacity and speed of fiber eliminate that problem, making real-time data redundancy feasible and ensuring almost no downtime. Fiber internet access, therefore, makes communities more attractive to new businesses that require large bandwidth capacity.

Every community can minimize the devastating effects of a natural disaster by being prepared and taking steps to ensure their community emerges after the disaster even better than it was before. This can be done by incorporating fiber internet into their community’s disaster recovery plan. It is an excellent way to improve the community in the wake of a disaster. Replacing obsolete systems with cutting-edge technology and offering a higher degree of data protection against future disasters make the community more attractive to profitable businesses.