May 22, 2022
Tamir Scheinok
The catastrophic outage last week took down a range of critical services. Absent clear and transparent communication from the telcos, we seem to be following patterns from the past and can expect more outages in the future. The core issue is that big telecoms do not care about rural communities despite the massive grants taken from state and federal sources to serve them:
Big Telecom have let networks fall apart. https://bit.ly/3wsiGyO
Local providers may be the key. https://n.pr/38BvJos
AT FURTHER REACH, WE DO CARE. Not only are we part of the community, but in many ways are a product of the Mendocino coast’s independent spirit and rural innovation. Being part of the community, we understand the importance of reliable, affordable broadband connectivity.
The equipment box pictured above is for a typical relay site. It encompasses years of iteration, design improvement, and hard-won best practices. All of the equipment, including the box itself, is in the service of reliability – far more than what is needed for the basic operation of this relay.
Not pictured are the multiple redundant wireless links interconnecting this relay to other sites, as well as the distributed fiber gateways to multiple top-tier data centers, to reduce the possibility of large-scale outages.
We consider many factors to optimize reliability for Further Reach’s network infrastructure:
HARDENING is the process of anticipating factors that could cause components to fail (e.g., flood, power outage/surge, wind, falling trees) and building defenses for those components to survive these events.
REDUNDANCY provides for backup components in case one fails and for an efficient means to swap out the failed component for the new one – ideally in an immediate and automated manner. Multiple wireless links among relay sites is key to this philosophy.
CULTURE matters. These are exceptionally hard design problems. Good designs are more likely to come from teams with open communication, from cultures that can tolerate honest evaluation of success and failure despite the seniority of those with the leading ideas. It requires time and iteration. It requires strong beliefs that are loosely held.
AMPLE BUDGETS. Building rural telecommunication infrastructure is especially expensive: by nature, Infrastructure is spread far and wide over a varied and challenging landscape. It is a terrible place to build infrastructure of any sort – in many ways, this is also the key to its rugged charm.
DISTRIBUTION & MESH. Fortunately, there is no need to ruin the coastline with large infrastructure sites. By distributing infrastructure across many small sites, the overall system is more reliable though it is much more expensive to build and maintain.
#connectLocal
See on Facebook
“Further Reach is way better than my previous cable-wired service here in Fort Bragg, which was always dropping my FaceTime and work calls. They also stay online through the storms which is a big plus.”
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“Amazing service Further Reach! In spite of all the PGE outages you guys were always ON for us. Keep up the good work!”
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“Further Reach is totally reliable!”
See these comments and others at facebook.com/FurtherReach