By far, our biggest challenge is a highly unreliable power grid – the PGE outage maps light up like a Christmas tree during weather events.  Other challenges include extreme wind, torrential rain, power surges, corrosive ocean spray, and innumerable operational hurdles like availability of fuel or bypassing road closures.  

After a decade of iteratively improving our infrastructure deployment and procedures to withstand these challenging conditions, overall, the Further Reach network performed exceptionally well during the recent storms of November 2024. There were a few contained outages that we repaired within 60-90 minutes.  

Frustratingly, our service in Point Arena was not satisfactory.  Some backup links did not operate as expected, and customers experienced slow service.  We worked through the weekend to resolve these issues.  In the coming weeks, we will analyze in detail what went wrong so that this issue will not be repeated. We sincerely apologize for the degraded service in Point Arena during last week’s storm.

Power redundancy is made possible through extensive ongoing investments to harden our network and build redundancies, including power efficient equipment and design, specialized batteries and chargers, power management and monitoring software, fixed and portable generators, years of preparation and planning, and seasoned team and equipment now on both sides of the Garcia.

We also get a lot of help from community members who generously provide power to nearby relays – !! BIG THANKS TO RELAY HOSTS !!

Our work is not done. 15% of our subscribers are served by very new relays or relays that are too small to have battery backups. If you are served by one of these relays, we will consider adding backup power or providing you with equipment to charge your relay.  Please contact us if you are interested.

https://furtherreach.net/faq-/backup-power/.
 

Large core network sites are maintained directly by us and have sufficient infrastructure (batteries, generators, fuel, and staff) to run for weeks without grid power.

History and Solution Design

Initially, our standard practice was installing backup power at all core sites to run for 12-24 hours in case of a utility failure.

Because outages were typically restricted to relatively small geographic areas, this approach would allow us sufficient time to bring a generator to the site if PGE faced an extended repair. This initial approach to power backups performed well for years. 

The 2019 PGE Public Safety Power Shutoff (PSPS) was an unprecedented event, 108-hour long, and one that affected our entire 800 square mile service area at the same time.  

While our infrastructure performed very well with no loss of connectivity to core sites and most of the network, the PSPS did catastrophic damage to our battery infrastructure – AGM batteries were damaged by being deeply discharged for nearly five days.

● We have an affordable backup device that we recommend to subscribers who do not have a backup generator.