Hurricane Helene Communications Outages Show Need for Greater Network Resilience

Hurricane Helene has devastated southeastern states with its winds and catastrophic flooding, leaving two million people without power and taking most forms of communications offline. As such, the storm has elevated the crucial issue of network resiliency skyward for enterprise IT and service providers.

Some stats put the scope of the disaster into perspective. For example, almost 1.8 million homes and businesses in seven states from Florida to Ohio remained without power on Monday night, according to the website Poweroutage.us, including 643,000 in South Carolina and 480,000 in Georgia.

Once floodwaters subside, the process of restoring power across the vast storm-swept region can begin. The destruction or damage of carrier network infrastructure will also challenge network recovery efforts. Broken and washed away telephone poles will need to be replaced, as will fiber optic cable that increasingly runs across them.

Knocked-out bridges -- which carry carriers' physical network media -- will present a tall and time-consuming task. Fixing things in the region will take two years, according to one estimate.

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