The internet is designed to be resilient. But after Hurricane Maria in 2017, as Puerto Ricans rushed to contact friends and family, many found they couldn’t get online.
The storm broke power lines and toppled telecom towers, taking out 95.6% of cell sites and leaving Puerto Ricans scrambling for a signal. It zapped the internet.
Half a million homes were damaged, thousands of people died. By some estimates, the territory experienced the worst power failure in U.S. history.
Extreme weather caused by climate change increases the likelihood that disaster will strike again soon – in Puerto Rico and around the world – and that once again, loss of internet will make a humanitarian crisis even harder to overcome.
“We’re talking about humans of flesh and bone [who died] because of telecommunications, because you couldn’t pick up the phone or message someone,” said Puerto Rican journalist Sandra Rodriguez in an interview with NOVA Next about the internet outages.
Following Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico’s internet problems soon spread. Several countries in South America that rely on submarine cables that land on the Caribbean island, including Argentina and Brazil, experienced network disruptions in September 2017 due to power failures.
A variety of small and big scale initiatives to restore the internet blossomed. The non-profit NetHope sent and installed WiFi equipment. Telecom companies deployed mobile hotspots. Google’s Project Loon delivered internet via balloons. Still, it took nearly a year to restore power to the whole island, and average internet speeds did not reach pre-storm levels until August 2018, according to NOVA Next.
With hurricane season looming every year, Puerto Rican internet advocates are pushing for measures to fortify the internet for the next big storm. In February 2018, The Internet Society (ISOC), a nonprofit that champions internet access for all, issued a report informed by their Caribbean chapters of what could be done to prevent another connectivity disaster.
Electricity is a must-have. But the island’s natural geography and historic planning makes energy supply tricky. For instance, while most of Puerto Rico’s 3.3 million people live in northern metropolitan areas, 70% of power generation happens in the south. That awkward centralization means the grid system has to cut across the island, exposing wires to the elements.
Distributing power up Puerto Rico’s mountains is also difficult and costly. After the power outage, cell towers relied on backup generators. Once the generator fuel ran out, “You couldn’t get to the towers because the roads were blocked, so antennas started to drop off because they didn’t have power. It was messy,” said Eduardo Diaz, a director of the ISOC Puerto Rico board who is also assembling an advisory committee to help develop the chapter’s strategic plan.
Diaz says local loss of confidence in the grid is driving new, sustainable, decentralized energy solutions that fit the climate better. “This is a tropical island, you get sun most times of the year… You won’t believe how many people want to get into solar, or be offgrid in case something like this happens again. There’s a huge market,” Diaz says.
But Puerto Rico also needs to raise climate awareness among internet stakeholders. Despite working in a storm-prone area, the internet industry doesn’t always build sustainably.
Shernon Osepa, Regional Affairs Manager for Latin America & The Caribbean Bureau at ISOC, sees a need to address this problem. “These operators know that we live in a very vulnerable environment, but some of them are deploying networks as if we’re living in a region where these things don’t happen,” Osepa cautioned, noting that some Caribbean infrastructure is only rated to withstand category 3 hurricanes, despite facing category 4-5 hurricanes.
Opening data to the public is also key for the recovery. “We don’t have a picture of how bad the telecommunication is,” Diaz says. He argues that the Puerto Rico Broadband Taskforce should prioritize creating a map of what parts of the island are without broadband service.
Puerto Rico suffered from broken infrastructure and budget cuts long before the storm. The U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency has contributed large sums to emergency repairs, but politicians are reluctant to supply the funds necessary for a complete infrastructure redesign. Instead they opt for quick-fixes, or even plans that are not in Puerto Rico’s best interests.
In response to tight budgets, Diaz encourages creative thinking and more sustainable solutions. For instance, he says, existing internet access grants for public schools could be used to create “anchor institutions” that help supply internet to people in surrounding communities.
Climate change is rapidly creating new hurdles for internet advocates in the Caribbean and around the world. We can expect more hurricanes and natural disasters for sure. This urgently calls for alternative and regionally appropriate infrastructure to be deployed already today.
How would you make internet infrastructure more sustainable?
It would be good to invest in more mesh networking development.
More energy efficient switching routing devices are fundamental, and multiple modes of transmission may help optimize among {reliability, energy efficiency, speed} to match business and user needs, yet energy savings of smart systems should try to exceed the energy requirement to run them. Performance might benefit from devices able to power off excess capacity and even inform scheduling demand peaks from businesses with a large transmission volume with a flexible schedule. While some data needs to move fast, there may be volumes of data that could move more efficiently at slower speeds that can transmit riding on on the AC or switched long distance DC power cables. It would be like a voluntary slow lane.
Redundancy is key to robust stability in both good and bad weather. Buried fiber optic cables are great and solar micro-grid backup can greatly increase the chances of sustained connections. However, alternative modes where cell phone communications via towers or satellite could take over to assure connectivity in emergencies. Insurance contract arrangements to provide enhanced satellite backup systems in periods of disaster could speed response times and efforts to restore proper emergency services. Policy and equipment could allow for a disaster response mode in which all service providers optimally share to simply get messages through without regard to standard service arrangements during crises. Micro-&nano-grids could assure nodes of communication and power can both operate independently and network significant power as lines of communication must reconfigure data paths to compromised network. Solar panels could be standard on cell phone towers, and alternative radio transmission systems. Finally communications passed from device to device among cell phones could be a last resort means to deliver messages beyond the direct reach of damaged networks. The distribution of publicly accessible remote power sources to sustain cell phones through a month or more of disaster repair becomes vital.
While independent modules can adapt most flexibly, efficiency of the system requires some distributed awareness that involves challenges to privacy and resistance to viral malfunctions. A resonant radio energy distribution to nodes may avoid need to protect transmission lines and allow power to be added from multiple points.