Hurricane Helene Hammers Telecom Infrastructure in the Southeast

Hurricane Helene hit wireless and wireline facilities hard in North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia and other states in the Southeast.

AP reported Tuesday afternoon that more than 150 people have died as a result of the Category 4 hurricane. And more than 150,000 affected households are now registered to receive from assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, AP reported. In the meantime, telecommunications infrastructure across the affected region is to beginning to recover after a rash of outages.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) reported Tuesday that 797,000 subscribers of telephone, television and internet services in the disaster area lack service. That number shrank from more than 886,000 on Monday and slightly over 1 million on Sunday. Affected wireline and cable users in South Carolina continued to tick up into Tuesday, according to the latest report.

Source: Communications Status Report for Areas Impacted by Hurricane Helene September 30, 2024

Cellular connectivity similarly took a pummeling, particularly in North Carolina. Of all the 1,452 cell sites in the affected North Carolina area, roughly 700 (49%) were out of service as of Tuesday evening. That's an improvement from 54% on Monday. In only three cases was this due to actual damage to the cell sites. Most commonly, the cell sites went down due to a loss of power (338). Another 300 went down due to a loss of transport. Buncombe County, home to the severely impacted city of Asheville, has 62% cell sites out of service.

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For affected area Georgia cell sites, 22% are still out. About 12% of cell sites in the affected Tennessee area are out of service, and 7% of in-area cell sites in South Carolina are still out of service. That number was 3.5% Virginia. Florida went from 1% out on Monday to almost 37% on Tuesday, but that is due to the FCC eliminating some Florida and Georgia counties from its tally.

Starlink Requests Tick Up

Sources at managed network services provider and aggregator MetTel said many of its partners have reached out to it on behalf of "hard hit" North Carolina customers. With wireless and wireline connectivity hampered, those customers are turning to low earth orbit (LEO) satellite-based internet from Starlink. MetTel and other service providers resell and manage Starlink solutions.

"Customers include health care and assisted living facilities in the Ashville, North Carolina, area (and surrounding towns) where they are trying to regroup from the storm," a spokesperson from MetTel said. "To get their comms back up and running quickly, MetTel is working real-time to provide Starlink connectivity."

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MetTel's Starlink crash kits will use the generators of the affected customer facilities, the company said.

"We are working urgently to turn these kits around as fast as possible for these health care customers because we know that they are dealing with a complete catastrophe and need to care for their patients and residents," the spokesperson said.

Devastation and Community

While Florida appears to have fared better in terms of telecom infrastructure, the state nevertheless experienced severe flooding.

Daniel Rosenrauch, CEO of Viirtue, shared with Channel Futures a picture of the flooding in his backyard in Tampa.

Source: Daniel Rosenrauch

His colleague, Sean Bailey, a support manager at Viirtue, was worse off. Five-foot waters flooded Bailey's home and destroyed all of his possessions, as well as his vehicle. His colleagues have set up a GoFundMe page.

One Charlotte, North Carolina-based fiber customer of Kairos Data Communications was scheduled for a site survey. The tech making the site survey for the fiber provider went the extra mile.

Kairos' MaryTom Hofer

"I received a kudos email from [the customer] that said when the tech went out there for a survey, he offered to drive to the neighboring locations to check on the people that were working there," said MaryTom Hofer, partner and director of operations at Kairos. "... The customer told me that restored her faith in humanity and that she was so thankful to have him there."

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