Measures to Sustain Telco Networks During Natural Disasters

EghtesadOnline: Taking into account the fact that Iran is situated in an earthquake-prone zone, officials from the ICT Ministry held a meeting with local mobile service providers, discussing ways to mitigate the devastating effects of natural disasters on communications networks.

News ID: ۷۸۳۴۶۲

29 July 2018

During a crisis management committee meeting in Tehran, Director of Tehran Province’s Information and Communication Technology Bureau Morteza Rezaei said, “One of the essential needs in times of crisis is to have access to stable communications services.”

Rezaei added that power outages, followed by disruptions in communication networks, require taking proper measures in advance to feed base transceiver stations (BTS); though most of the plants can be powered by emergency batteries, they should be kept under constant supervision, and need equipment such as diesel generators to remain operational even in the worst possible scenarios.

“Drills were run by the Communication Regulatory Authority to monitor BTS antennas on July 17 and 18, the results of which are to be released later,” Financial Tribune quoted him as saying.

Pointing to the earthquake which hit Tehran back in December 2017, he stated that local operators have been assigned the task of updating their systems in order to be capable of maneuvering through the murk of catastrophic circumstances.

During the meeting, representatives from major local mobile operators namely Mobile Telecommunication Company of Iran (MCI), MTN-Irancell and RighTel listed various strategies used in dealing with power outages in critical circumstances.

Through a specialized task force, communication plants will be monitored, safety measures will be enhanced, plants are being supplied with more lithium batteries and collaborations with different provinces is set to be shaped. Sixty-seven diesel generators have been dedicated to supplying power to the communications networks in times of crisis.

Provision of backup power systems, retrofitting telecommunication towers, increasing the capacity of nearby communication networks, calibrating seismic vibration sensors in telecommunication centers and forming rapid response teams are among the measures implemented to handle emergency situations.

Also attending the meeting, secretary to the ICT crisis management working group, Mohammad Samadaei, talked about an exclusive network capable of offering services to 20,000 users devised for the time a disaster strikes. HiWeb, one of Iran’s largest Internet providers, is the contractor assigned to the task.