Net, phones on hold
Net, phones on hold
Fiber optic cable break Thursday
| Jackie Andresen checks her cellular phone for service on Washington Street in Marquette Thursday afternoon. Some cellular phone and Internet services were disrupted in the Upper Peninsula and parts of northeastern Wisconsin for most of Thursday. (Journal photo by Miriam Moeller) |
By MIRIAM MOELLER, Journal Staff Writer
MARQUETTE — Workers digging a culvert severed a fiber optic cable early Thursday in the Wausaukee, Wis., area, knocking out some cellular phone and Internet service for most of the day throughout the Upper Peninsula and parts of northeastern Wisconsin.
“Some of the cell phones and even some of our high speed Internet flows through Wisconsin,” said Steve Balbierz, director of external affairs with the telephone company AT&T. “This fiber cut caused this problem; it’s affecting service to cell phone providers, Internet access ... as well as long distance service depending on who your carrier would be,” he said.
Balbierz said that many long-distance careers hand off their traffic to companies that channel the data through fiber optic cables.
Nsight Teleservices of Green Bay provides that service to many long-distance carriers in Northern Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula.
Nsight’s fiber optic cable was cut during a construction accident.
“It happened shortly after 7 o’clock (Central Standard Time) this morning (Thursday) and it occurred when someone was laying a culvert; they were doing road construction,” said Nadia Farr, public relations spokeswoman for Nsight.
Farr said that engineers were working to excavate and splice the cable Thursday afternoon. According to The Associated Press, service was restored to major carriers by early Thursday evening. Farr said she didn’t know how many individual users were affected by the outage.
The interruption in service varied depending on whether the long-distance carrier used the particular fiber optic cable that was cut.
“For us it was Internet and phone,” Farr said. “It depends upon what they are using that fiber for.”
Balbierz said that this incident shows the double-edged sword of modern technology. In the past, data and voice communications flowed through hundreds of copper wires — now a single fiber optic cable has enough capacity to handle the same volume.
“Hundred of thousands of calls, voice calls and data are all bunched together, and they are sent down that cable,” he said.
Rene Schwemin who works at the Kitch Law Firm in Marquette said she first noticed that something was wrong with her service when she could not get online Thursday morning. Later she heard other people complaining that their cellular phones weren’t working.
“We have no phones, no long-distance service and it’s kind of interrupted our office daily work,” she said. “Actually we’re kind of at a standstill.”
Jackie Andresen of Marquette and her husband tried to use their cellular phones in the morning and quickly realized they didn’t work.
“You do realize how much you depend on it,” Andresen said.
She said she was planning on going to her mother’s house to use a land-line phone.
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