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Island Networks reports increased usage in wireless services post hurricane Dean |
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Written by TechJamaica.com
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Thursday, 13 September 2007 |
Hurricane Dean brought chaos to some telecommunications and internet service providers but wireless service providers such as Island Networks Limited --- weathered the storm well and came out with an increase in their customer base and network usage.
CEO of Island Networks Limited (INL) Andrew Massias said the company was able to keep the majority of its clients connected throughout the hurricane through its robust state of the art MPLS platform which provides network solutions to some of Jamaica 's largest multi-location companies.
"Our team worked 24/7, our network operations center was opened 24/7 and we ran generators at nearly all of our sites across the island. Our system is a wireless system that interconnects branch offices across the island and we are obviously not as susceptible to this kind of weather condition because we don't have wires in the ground -- we are fixed wireless", he explained.
Mr. Massias said for the most part, the fixed wireless system utilized by the company stood up well to hurricane winds but he noted that there was some minor damage to a few of their sites.
"We did sustain some minor damage to some sites in the Southfield and Black River area and one or two in the northern part of the island but we kept service going throughout the hurricane with minimal interruptions in the major metro areas" Mr. Massias noted.
Mr. Massias said the company spent a significant portion of time preparing for the hurricane in order to provide the high level of service attested to by their clients.
This included improvements to INL's state of the art Network Operations Centre which monitored sites through out the hurricane.
"We also communicated with our clients in different ways before the hurricane-- via email or telephone. We informed most of our customers about the numbers where they could reach our technical staff during and post hurricane," he added.
"Our response time was within a few hours of the outage and the areas that were affected primarily due to heavy wind where antennas had shifted, we dispatched our crews to these sites and were able to have these areas back up and running in reasonable time," he said.
Information systems manager for the Jamaica Broilers Group, Christopher Ramdon attested to this noting that service was quickly restored to some of the Group’s locations which were connected by Island Networks and which went down during the passage of the hurricane.
“90% of our locations were back up within two days and the remaining locations were up and running by Thursday of that week”, he said.
Mr. Ramdon described INL’s customer service as “excellent” throughout the hurricane. “We were sent emails that alerted us if we weren’t previously alerted about the impending hurricane and we were also given contact numbers for quite a number of their engineers and support staff whom we could contact directly”, he said.
Ongoing contact with INL's technical staff also allowed Jamaica Broilers to continue using its business critical operations even after the hurricane.
Technical manager for Jamaica Money Market Brokers Limited (JMMB) Ricardo Ebanks said his company was pleased with the quality of service provided by INL pre and post hurricane Dean. JMMB utilizes INL's BRANCHconnect wireless service along with service from another provider.
Mr. Ebanks said the INL team provided prompt information including a list of contact persons within the organization who could render assistance during the hurricane.
"By having two providers what we are doing is mitigating the risk of hurricanes, someone knocking over a pole or another disaster that might take out one technology but leave the other in place," he said.
WISYNCO group technical services manager Chris Magnus said his company which utilize INL's service, took the "prevention being better than cure" approach to securing their communications during the hurricane by removing the main antenna located at the company's headquarters.
"We removed our antenna before Dean hit so this prevented any possible damage but once the antenna was backup our service was back." Mr. Magnus said.
This however did not affect the wireless service provided to WISYNCO's other locations, which remained intact and ran uninterrupted after the hurricane.
Developing Trends
Mr. Massias said with the hurricane's passage a number of trends have emerged among INL's customers, as most use multiple service providers for their information technology needs.
"Usually what we see is that during or after a hurricane or very bad storm there is more usage on the INL network primarily because customers can't use the other network. We were able to track that and see that there was significant additional usage, Mr. Massias pointed out.
He adds that increased usage on the network is also attributable to the fact that “Customers are starting to migrate to different types of IP based services across this network which is really what MPLS is designed for".
Mr. Massias said that a driving force behind the company's growth has been that of following the directives of customers and expanding service provision even beyond initial planning. |
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