North goes radio silent
Telesat satellite malfunction causes phone, internet outage
Beth Brown
Northern News Services
Saturday, October 8, 2016
NUNAVUT
Northerners were without landline and mobile phone service, internet, television, and radio for 19 hours after a satellite malfunctioned on the evening of Oct. 3.
A technician works on the Ice Wireless building in Iqaluit. - photo courtesy of Cameron Zubko
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The Telesat Anik F2 satellite, used by Northwestel and SSi Micro, services communities throughout Nunavut, NWT, Yukon and Northern Quebec. The Sunday evening outage lasted into Monday morning.
"Sometimes these things happen and you can't control it," said Community and Government Services spokesperson Kris Mullaly.
"We've made sure every community in Nunavut has satellite phones, as a back up if and when land lines go down."
He encouraged residents to make sure those phones are charged, and to have extra food around and cash in small bills on hand for when ATM machines aren't working.
"Satellites are very reliable but they seem to get a lot of press when they do go down," Telesat's John Flaherty said. "The safest and quickest way to establish service was to reboot the computer systems on the satellite."
He said this process takes many hours. This was the same solution used in a large scale outage that happened in 2011.
Iqaluit, Cambridge Bay, and Rankin Inlet were not completely without service, SSi Micro's David Veniot in an Oct. 3 release, because these communities are serviced by a second satellite, Anik F3.
Veniot noted such an incident is a reason remote Northern communities need redundancy infrastructure. Flaherty said the use of Anik F3 to service central Nunavut communities is an indication of the effort to increase available redundancies.
Telesat is currently building a new satellite, Telstar 19 Vantage, which Flaherty said will add 'spot beams' to supplement existing broad beams and increase the strength of service.
"There will be a lot more capacity in those spot beams," he said. "You will get more throughput."
He said adding this satellite could add as much as 10 times the capacity available across the North today. He said how this capacity will be distributed is the responsibility of service providers.
During the outage, subscribers to Ice Wireless were still able to use their cell phones and access the internet.
"It's one of those things we are exposed to in the North, it's a place where there are few service providers," Ice Wireless chief operating officer Cameron Zubko said. "We can't just rely on the telephone company to carry all the burden of providing redundancy. We should be encouraging competition in the North."
Ice Wireless emergency phones used at police and nursing stations in Northern Quebec functioned throughout the Telesat outage. Zubko called this another route for ensuring that emergency services are not put at risk during a blackout.
No serious emergencies were reported during the incident.
Mullaly said while cost of the outage is hard to quantify, the potential financial loss for government and local businesses was lessened by its timing, outside of business hours for most.
