Thursday April 12 at 9 p.m., through Friday, April 13 at 6 a.m.
— from Rock Island Communications —
On April 12 from 9 p.m. to April 13 at 6 a.m., the county is going to experience a county-wide communications outage.
The 48-count fiber-optic cable carrying all data and voice traffic from San Juan County for ALL providers is going to be relocated just south of Anacortes at SR-20 and Spur (Sharpes Corner).
WSDOT will be shutting down and re-routing this fiber cable as they implement a traffic change in this area. More information about the WSDOT construction project HERE. WSDOT’s official release can be found HERE.
WAVE Broadband, the owner of the cable, will be performing the work. They have given Rock Island some very vague ideas as to the exact timing of the work. We are currently unsure when the cable will be cut exactly, and which critical fiber links will be connected prior to the work window close.
We hope the actual outage will be well within the 9-hour window, but given the nature of the proposed project, we should all be prepared to see severely constrained services for most of the outage window.
Rock Island will be able to process some communications via microwave links from Mt. Constitution to Bellingham, and from North Blakely to a LTE site on Lummi island. We are also working with our voice partners T-Mobile, Ooma, Jive and to see how we can maintain some level of cellular and digital voice communications around the county during this period.
Why is there no other fiber path in Anacortes for redundancy?
This question has been a concern for Rock Island for some time now. For over 20 years all carriers (CenturyLink, Rock Island, Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, Zito Media, etc.) have relied on this one fiber path traveling through Fidalgo Island. Rock Island has been working with the City of Anacortes and WSDOT to develop a secondary fiber path from the west side of Fidalgo Island all the way to Mt. Vernon. This will give us full carrier and path redundancy and isolate us from problems like this in the future.
Rock Island Communications provides modern, scalable and reliable Internet services to homes and businesses in San Juan County. They are a wholly-owned subsidiary of Orcas Power & Light Cooperative. For more information, visit rockisland.com.
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This notice from Rock Island is less than clear. Are they indicating that an on-island communications blackout will also occur?
Does this equally affect CenturyLink traditional telephone service?
Yes, Don – the communications blackout/outage will affect all the islands. If you have a land line and a plug-in-the-wall telephone (not a “portable”) you will still be able to use your land line.
I’m not sure that this will affect cell phone carrier signals, since their signals come from elsewhere, but it will affect computers and pads reliant on any cables.
I’m curious to know what that orange cable is for that is being laid along roadsides all over Orcas.
The majority of (Landline/VoIP/Cell) voice communications will remain up during the outage period. Normal data use will be down and/or very constrained as to ensure critical voice calls will make it out and back if there is an emergency. Cell customers on VZ, ATT and Sprint will be down completely unless they make a 911 call which will access the TMO sites (assuming the user is in a location to see signal from the TMO site) and the call will go out as needed.
The Orange conduit is fiber.