March 11, 2024
Tamir Scheinok

RELIABILITY IS OUR PRIMARY GOAL

We love keeping our subscribers online during challenging conditions – we know that Infrastructure reliability is critical for our community. This is especially true when most of the utility infrastructure serving our community is extremely fragile and prone to failure, particularly at times when it is needed most; during storms, fires, and PSPS events.

FURTHER REACH was founded with reliability as a primary goal.

In fact, our network design is based on our founder’s UC-Berkeley research, which focused on delivering highly reliable services despite the significant challenges of the Mendocino coast. These include a highly unreliable power grid, frequent tree falls, fires, strong winds, road closures, and a sparsely populated customer base spread over hundreds of square miles.

INFRASTRUCTURE ON UTILITY POLES IS NOT RELIABLE

It is abundantly clear that delivering service on utility poles, while convenient for utility companies in the short term, is the least reliable method, especially in forested areas. Thousands of miles of suspended cables are highly susceptible to damage from falling trees/branches, fire, vehicles hitting cables or poles, and earthquakes.

Repairs for infrastructure on utility poles are slow and expensive for a number of reasons:

 Discovering the failure point could take hours or longer as roads are often impassable in storm conditions. Sometimes utilities must use helicopters to effectively locate problems.

 Once problems are located, repair teams are often delayed due to impassable roads.

 Repair times can be further delayed as the power transmission lines at the top of the poles must be repaired before the telecommunication providers can safely repair their lines. Adding to the challenge is that there are often separate tiers of power lines (high, medium, and low voltage), which each have their own repair team and schedule and must be repaired sequentially.

 Finally, repair teams require large vehicles and specialized equipment, which naturally limits their availability to make repairs. Unlike old copper cables, fiber-optic cables are very fragile and are MUCH more challenging – repairs require specialized splicing equipment and training.

Because providing wired service in such a sparsely populated and remote area is not commercially attractive to corporate providers, external funding (taxpayer-funded incentives) is necessary for them to bring their service to the community. Over time, these providers do not sufficiently invest in maintenance because the government funding only assists with the initial installation. Without continual investment in maintenance and upgrades, quality and reliability degrade as the cost of maintaining service increases.

Our community has seen repeated examples of corporate providers suspending service (or attempting to do so despite contractual commitments) once it is unprofitable for them to maintain it.

WIRELESS IS (FAR) MORE RELIABLE

Further Reach’s service operates wirelessly, offering fundamental design advantages over utility pole-based infrastructure.

 Over our 800-square-mile service area and ten years of service, damage from falling trees has never been a significant issue.

 The lack of reliable grid power is our largest challenge, for which we design sophisticated backup solutions where we can maintain 85% of our network despite a power grid failure.

 Our network reliability improves over time as the density of subscribers allows us to continually invest in hardening and redundancy across the network.

Further Reach’s network design allows us to be financially sustainable, not requiring any outside funding for the initial installation or continual investment in maintenance and upgrades.

We are extremely proud of our track record of reliability – we continue to invest in improvements to keep you connected during extended storm/power events.

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

Feel free to reach out with questions at 707-278-8899 or connect@furtherreach.net. Visit our website to see our plans and to sign up for a free site evaluation at furtherreach.net/check-availability/.

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