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Flood areas: Providers restore the cellular network

2021-07-19T08:54:38.473Z


In order to cope with their everyday lives, those affected also need telephone and internet reception. Emergency teams from providers have now been able to restore the network in many areas.


Maintenance work on a cell tower.

In the flooded areas, the power supply must first be restored

Photo: Daniel Reinhardt / dpa

Organizing clothing and food, applying for help, informing relatives and friends - those affected in the flood areas are currently in many cases dependent on functioning means of communication.

That is why the emergency teams of the mobile phone companies have been working for days to at least restore the mobile phone coverage in the affected areas.

The floods also caused some serious damage to the telecommunications infrastructure. There are places in which a completely new infrastructure has to be built, because the lines there along with entire streets have been torn away, a Telekom spokesman told SPIEGEL on Friday. "The masses of water and debris in the Ahr valley and the Eifel have caused great damage to our landline infrastructure," the spokesman said. Employees have been busy repairing the damage and creating an emergency supply since Thursday night.

The work is now making good progress.

Two thirds of the 150 affected stations are now back in operation, said a spokesman for the network operator Telefónica (o2) on Sunday.

Deutsche Telekom said that more than half of the 130 cellular sites that had failed are now back on the network.

In most cases, the network operator's antennas had failed because the power supply was interrupted.

"Many of the stations that are still down are in places that are not yet accessible again," said the Telefónica spokesman.

There are four mobile stations in use, ten more are ready.

Emergency supply with mobile antennas

At Vodafone, a sixth of the mobile phone stations in the German flood disaster areas were still not on the network on Sunday, as a company spokesman reported.

For systems in the surrounding areas, the range has been increased to enable "basic coverage".

With such a basic supply, the performance is somewhat weaker than usual, but at least it enables connections again in some places.

Vodafone also relies on mobile units to plug radio gaps.

According to an estimate by the Düsseldorf company, ten percent of customers in the disaster areas are still without reception, i.e. in a dead zone.

At Telekom there are also dead spots in the flood areas. There are cell phone locations and cables that cannot yet be accessed for repairs or are not allowed for reasons of danger, said a company spokesman. "The main problems currently remain the lack of power supply and the accessibility of the locations." Overall, however, progress is being made.

It will take much longer for the landline connections to work again.

Many gray boxes - so-called cable distributors - were destroyed or damaged in the streets.

In addition, the water and debris tore out fiber optic and copper cables.

The switching centers are currently being made functional again, and the central hub in Gerolstein was brought back online at the weekend, the Telekom spokesman said.

Around 10,000 connections and several cell phone locations are attached to this exchange.

tmk / dpa

Source: spiegel

All tech articles on 2021-07-19

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