With two of the Internet’s main hubs (NY/NJ and Ashburn) and some of its most trafficked routes in Hurricane Sandy’s path last month, it leaves the question – how well did the communications grid manage during the storm? Turns out, the Internet actually fared the storm very well.
Traffic from major Internet Service Providers including Verizon, Level 3, Hurricane Electric, NTT, and Tata was seamlessly transferred to alternate routes to avoid New York/New Jersey during the brunt of the storm. None of them actually went down at all and the data kept flowing, demonstrating the state of the Internet and of modern network engineering in the face of an unexpected test on one of the Internet’s biggest hubs.
The majority of telecommunications outages caused by Hurricane Sandy’s were due to loss of power, whether the power loss occurred at cell towers, data centers, or even at people’s homes. The Internet did well aside from the power failures and equipment that was physically flooded.
Overall, Hurricane Sandy proved how resilient the Internet truly is, with the majority of the storm’s impact remaining local. “The Internet is highly resilient and is designed in such a way as to allow for its operation despite the impact of natural disasters,” said Shawn White, VP of Operations at Keynote, a company that provided a highly detailed analysis of how the Internet fared the storm.
At GeoTel Communications, we combine researched telecommunications infrastructure data with GIS to create map layers within GIS, which can be used to help find alternative routes for Internet traffic during an unexpected event like Hurricane Sandy. Whether you’re looking for data centers, fiber routes, cell towers, broadband providers, or fiber lit buildings, GeoTel has the data and solutions you need. Our coverage extends to more than 5,000 US cities and millions of miles of carrier fiber routes, which are digitized in GIS. Call us today for more information.
