Hurricane Gustav (National Weather Service) brought down cellular and Internet service in parts of Louisiana, but its impact was much milder than that of Katrina, reports the Associated Press.
- AT&T, the main landline phone company in the state, said it had 2,000 employees working to assess damage and perform repairs. Most of its cellular towers in areas hit by the hurricane were working Tuesday, according to spokesman Drew Giblin.
- Verizon Wireless said fewer than 1 percent of its Gulf Coast cell towers were out of operation Tuesday morning, mostly due to power outages.
- Sprint Nextel Corp said, “Power is the only critical issue affecting our network,” according to spokeswoman Stephanie Vinge-Walsh. On Tuesday morning, the company was waiting for permission from officials to enter stricken areas so it could connect portable generators to blacked-out cell sites and refill the fuel tanks of those that have their own generators.
- T-Mobile USA said it had also some network disruptions in south-central Louisiana due to commercial power issues.
The new MSNBC Hurricane Tracker is built on top of Microsoft’s Virtual Earth. Wind speed, ground speed, and pressure are displayed with the eye of the storm color-coded to denote Category 1 – 5 strength with GPS coordinates displayed on mouse-overs.
Katrina had a wider impact on telecommunications in 2005, prompting the FCC to propose a requirement that cellular carriers have eight-hour backup batteries for all their cell sites.
Wireless industry association CTIA, Sprint and T-Mobile fought the requirement in court and have prevented it from taking effect, saying that requiring each cell site, even in areas that aren’t disaster-prone, to have its own backup power is expensive and robs the companies of the flexibility to deploy generators in more sensitive areas.
Renesys, a firm that keeps track of the pathways of the Internet, noted that parts of the Louisiana network of cable company Charter Communications, which confirmed the outage, and said it was due to power outages.
Meanwhile, the Republican National Convention (Google News) is rolling on.
ADC and Qwest installed a fiber network at St. Paul’s Xcel Energy Center — site of the RNC, Sept. 1-4. Upgrading the facility required 229 miles of copper and coax and 12 miles of fiber-optic lines.
Ethernet-based service at a 10-Megabit or 100-Megabit level will be available to anyone who orders it
ADC supported wireless services for the RNC and DNC events using their FlexWave Universal Radio Head (URH) systems at the Xcel Energy Center to supply comprehensive 2.5G and 3G wireless voice and data connectivity throughout the facility.
Ustream.TV is the official live streaming video provider for the convention and will arrange live Web video chats so bloggers and journalists can interview Republican officials remotely. Video from the convention will be archived and available for other media outlets to repost. Network security for convention attendees will be provided by Cisco, Qwest, Microsoft, and McAfee. Unisys will provide IT support such as monitoring the convention servers.
CBS News is using Avid’s new HD editing and storage solutions working with the Avid DNxHD 145 codec, which will enable the production team to work with mastering quality HD material in real-time. ShadowTV will notify the RNC whenever any convention-related news is reported by any of the more than 250 television stations that ShadowTV montors.
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