While Torontonians spent most of last week digging their way out of a huge snowstorm, the team at Beanfield was working around the clock to resolve a different mess. To our shock, a fire caused by a hydro cable had completely destroyed a section of our fibre downtown, affecting the connection to some of our customers in the area. While we control our fibre network and are prepared for multiple scenarios that could impact our network traffic, sometimes events occur that are simply out of our hands.
Just before midnight on Sunday, January 16th, while the snow started to roll in, so did the calls to our Customer Experience Team, hearing reports of a possible outage from customers. We responded immediately. Once an initial investigation was completed by our Network Operations (NOC) team, it was all hands-on deck to manage and repair the damage caused by the fire as quickly as possible. Although not an event caused by our equipment, we still ensure we responded quickly and efficiently to bring our customers back online. This event called for multiple teams, from different departments to quickly come together in the wee hours of the morning and collaborate around the clock to get the job done.
Our construction teams were on-site within hours of the fire and patiently waited to gain access to our damaged fibre cables. Once Beanfield had the green light to safely access the site, our construction team and fibre splicing team worked tirelessly through the cold and around the clock to repair our fibre cables. Our teams worked at both ends of the cable, simultaneously pulling and splicing the fibre in a push to get our customers up and running. Despite the extreme cold and long hours, our teams were able to pull of this tedious and fine repair work without fault.
Working behind the scenes and alongside the construction team were our GIS team. These hidden soldiers know where each and every single piece of fibre belongs, almost like a master plan. The GIS team keeps all of our connections organized, streamlining the repair process in such an immeasurable way.
Our Customer Experience and Technical Support teams, who are the voice of Beanfield and the line of communication between our customers and internal teams kept the updates flowing around the clock throughout the outage.
Thankfully (but not surprisingly), Beanfield’s Network Engineering team has designed our fibre network with redundancy in mind. Thanks to their work and planning, we did not lose a single device during this outage and the NOC team was able to monitor and reroute network traffic.
This outage was a true team effort, with everyone working towards the same goal – to get our customers back online as quickly and safely as possible. Go team, go!
Want to see what the damaged cables from the fire looked like? Check out these photos.
