The excavator left Kamchatka, Chukotka and the Northern Kuril Islands without communication for 14 hours
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The lockdown lasted for more than 14 hours without the Internet and stable telephone communication in the Kamchatka Territory, the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug and Severo-Kurilsk due to damage to the terrestrial fiber-optic communication line (FOCL) by an unnamed excavator operator.
On Wednesday, November 15, the Internet and cellular communications from a number of operators suddenly disappeared. Around midnight, specialized repair teams from the Kamchatka branch of Rostelecom were able to reach the site of the fiber-optic line damage, 22 km from the Dalniy village of the Ust-Bolsheretsk region. As Rostelecom reported, the accident was caused by the actions of a third-party organization. As it turned out today, November 16, we quickly managed to find the excavator operator who damaged the cable during excavation work. He showed the repairmen the location of the break. However, the accident was eliminated and communications were restored in full only on Thursday morning.
Within 14 hours, residents of settlements in three regions of the country lost the opportunity to pay for goods in stores and fuel at gas stations through terminals, ATMs did not work, which quickly ran out of cash, applications for banks, taxi services, etc. did not work. Telephone communications was also extremely unstable, SMS messages were difficult to send.
Also, the system for selling goods with mandatory labeling (dairy products, tobacco products, mineral water, alcohol) did not work, even for cash.
Governor of the Kamchatka Territory Vladimir Solodov today, during a direct line, admitted that the accident showed the vulnerability of Kamchatka, and stated the need to create a reserve line in case of an emergency: “This is an expensive job, but necessary for our safety. I will continue to raise this issue at the federal level.”
This is the third major emergency that has happened to communications in Kamchatka due to excavator operators. In April 2017, due to a break in the fiber-optic line in the Khabarovsk Territory, not only Kamchatka, but also Sakhalin and Magadan were without communication for ten hours. And on May 31, 2021, a gust in the same Ust-Bolsheretsky region left Kamchatka without communications for six hours. Then they also seriously talked about the need to create backup lines for such cases, but the talk did not go any further.
As previously reported, in October 2016, Rostelecom completed work on the project for the construction of an underwater fiber-optic communication line Sakhalin-Magadan-Kamchatka (FOCL). The total length of the FOCL was about 1.7 thousand km. The maximum line capacity is up to 8 Tbit/s. The length of the above-ground part of the highway is also significant, which has been damaged several times.
The laying of fiber-optic communication lines allowed the regions to abandon expensive and slow satellite communications. Later, resources on the backbone optical communication line also became available to the Big Three operators.
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