Hurricane Frances impacts

Sun Sep 5 22:20:04 UTC 2004

Since the FCC no longer makes outage reports public, folks will have to
obtain their information from other sources.

The networks in Broward, Palm Beach, Martin, Brevard counties appear to
be the most impacted.  Cellular had problems due to wireless sites being
without power.  The wireless industry brought in 500 new generators in
advance of the hurricane, but needed to wait until the hurricane passed
before sending them out to the cell sites.  Miami and Orlando also have
sites down due to power issues and connectivity to local carriers.

The various local access line providers in Florida, Florida has a lot of
tiny LATAs and phone companies, report some access lines are down but
haven't published any counts.  Cable networks have the same issues with
local cable service.  No reports of damage to telephone central offices or
cable headends.

Due to power outages and local access network problems, bank networks and
cash machines are out of service in most of the affected counties.

No reports of problems to any NAPs, POPs, data centers or fiber trunks.
They generally have permanent generators. So if you have local
connectivity, Internet access is working.  Streaming audio/video from
Florida television and radio stations over the Internet did not have any
problems.

Some WiFi providers are once again offering free WiFi service in the
affected counties, if you can reach a working hotspot (with local power
and local network connectivity).