following the completion of the Restoration Efforts
Residents of Anguilla had their daily activities disrupted on February 18th due to an island-wide outage affecting all communication to and from the island. The outage was later determined by Flow’s technical team to have been caused by damage to the sub-sea fiber cable to the island by the anchors of a mega-yacht that was improperly moored. The fiber break left the entire island without mobile or internet connectivity.
C&W Communications, which trades as Flow, is Anguilla’s leading Communications and Entertainment provider, and the operator of the sub-sea cable network connecting Anguilla and the wider Caribbean to the Americas, and by extension, the rest of the world.
Following the incident, Flow’s teams were rapidly assembled to determine the cause of the outage and to begin restoration of service to the island. By February 19th, the company had already deployed its emergency redundancy plans to re-route mobile and data traffic via microwave links to St. Maarten, Antigua, and Barbados. Customers were given free roaming access to the Dutch ‘Chippie’ network to allow mobile calling to resume.
The company provided free mobile credit to its customers and provided additional free bandwidth to Anguilla’s other communications operators on island and enabled their customers to have access to free roaming over the temporary connection.
Additionally, Flow provided free handsets to the island’s emergency services to ensure that they were connected and communicated those contacts island-wide for Anguillans to access emergency services if needed.
By February 20th, Flow had flown in and assembled a team of over 50 technicians and specialists, including professional divers, to repair the cable on the sea floor. Typically, sub-sea fiber breaks are repaired by a specialized ocean vessel which can take weeks to reach the location of the break. However, by using specially trained divers, Flow was able to have this break repaired within 48 hours.
Clyde Richardson, Flow’s Director of Technical Operations, North Caribbean, who led the massive restoration effort said, “We are immensely grateful to the rapid response of our teams to restore communications to Anguilla in record time. I must also publicly thank the Governor of Anguilla, and the Governor’s Office for their role in facilitating our ability to respond to this crisis in an expeditious manner. We are also thankful for the assistance of other regional and local operators, like our Dutch counterparts Chippie, for stepping in and rendering emergency assistance as quickly as possible. We thank all Anguillans for their patience and understanding during this national crisis and for their vigilance in identifying the vessel responsible for the damage to the sub-sea fiber. Our response to this outage has tested our emergency response systems and demonstrated the immense talent that resides in our teams across the region. Our next steps
are to meet with Anguilla’s relevant authorities to ensure that we can avoid this type of scenario from occurring again.”
