Atlantic telecommunications reliability under question after service failures during Fiona

As post-tropical storm Fiona battered Atlantic Canada, it wasn’t long before many in the region lost power, and with it, the ability to communicate.

Carl Funk lives on the Eastern Shore, which was hit hard by the storm, and says communication was nearly impossible.

“We had no phone service, there was a little pocket in the community where you could maybe get a couple of bars.”

In Dartmouth, Sandra Bonn says the only way she was able to check how her family members were doing was by driving over to their place.

“It’s horrible, the communication is very important,” said Bonn.

And that’s a main concern for Nova Scotia NDP leader Claudia Chender.

“I was really nervous. We have a lot of vulnerable seniors. For a lot of people living alone, communication is their lifeline.”

On Sunday during a media briefing, Geoff Moore, director of network operations for Bell, said they did what they could to prepare for the storm.

“Given that amount of damage to both Bell’s network as well as other networks, I believe we did a very very good job at keeping connected.”

Moore explained that while their service sites rely on power, they do have back up batteries in case of outages.

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“Given the magnitude of the power outages and as well the duration of the storm and thirdly, access to sites, unfortunately, some of our batteries exhausted within our sites,” he said.

Read more: Fiona, a record-setting storm, leaves path of destruction in eastern Canada

Moore explained that once the batteries ran out, they had teams working to provide generator backups to the sites to restore services as quickly as possible.

Chender says that’s not good enough.

“We knew what was coming and Bell knew what was coming and Eastlink knew what was coming,” she said.

Chender is also calling for more transparency. Nova Scotia Power is required to provide information on power outages with estimated restoration times, telecommunication companies are not required to do anything similar and it’s unknown just how widespread service failures were during the storm and how many people remain without cell service.

“The impacts, they’re not an inconvenience, they’re very real,” said Premier Tim Houston on Monday was asked about the issue.

“There will be a discussion about how we regulate, oversee and make sure that the services are there for Nova Scotia.”

Ultimately though, telecommunication regulations falls to the federal government.

On Tuesday when federal Ministers were asked about Fiona response, Dominic LeBlanc spoke about cell service outages and regulations on behalf of his colleague Francois-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry. He said the federal government has served notice to telecommunication companies that they’re expected to do everything they can to build up resiliency of their infrastructure and work collaboratively.

“The reassuring thing is that we’re hearing from all these companies that they also accept this responsibility,” he said.

As of Tuesday though, it remains unclear how many Nova Scotians remain without cellular and internet service or when it will be fully restored.

In an emailed statement, a Bell Spokesperson says “most Bell network equipment sites across Nova Scotia remained operational throughout … Our teams across the region have been joined by neighboring crews, and are working extremely hard in challenging conditions to both restore power to the small number of sites still down.”

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