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One NZ Looking For Solution To Make Fibre Lines Resilient To Rats
Telecommunications company One New Zealand is investigating whether it needs another cable supplying the lower South Island after internet and phone services were cut to thousands of people.
Rats chewed through a fibre cable near Dunedin, while the area's second main cable - a back up - was accidentally cut by a contractor between Gore and Balclutha on Wednesday.
One New Zealand enterprise and commercial director Joe Goddard said it was a rare situation in which two important lines were cut within hours.
"First we had one go down at 6.30am and then three-and-a-half hours later we had another fibre cut, so the teams worked through the day to restore those, the first fibre line was restored at 4pm and the next one was later in the evening," he said.
"The chances of two fibre lines going down within hours of each other are very, very small and obviously we're working through our processes around how do we prevent these instances in future, and also how can we get that up and running as fast as possible.
"We'll look at whether we need another line of redundancy down to the bottom of the South Island and how do we make our fibre lines more resilient to rodents."
Goddard apologised to customers affected by the outage.
"We monitor our network extensively so any losses of traffic we are on it straight away, we have network alarms that tell us whether there's any degradation to the service," he said.
Total Works Pest New Zealand owner Norman Kerr said it was not unusual for rodents to chew through cables.
"Rats' teeth constantly grow so they need to gnaw to wear their front and sides down otherwise they become too long and they can't actually eat. They'll gnaw on anything wherever they get access to so if they've got access inside these service areas where these cables are they'll just gnaw on anything that's close to them and hard plastic coatings on these cables and power cables are ideal," he said.
"We constantly see rats gnawing on mains cables coming into buildings and commercial areas, they just gnaw basically down to the wire and then they end up shortening it out once they hit the wire."
Kerr said it could be fatal for the rat but they often got away with it.
He said companies should be on top of pest control.
"Most commercial companies will have a rodent management programme but in quite a lot of cases, like in the supermarkets recently when they got rats in their stores down south, they closed down their businesses because their rodent control programme wasn't up to it, so it all depends on the contractor and who they're using, how proactive they are, and what sort of programme they're doing on these sites," he said.
Fire and Emergency relied on back-up systems for its Southern Communications Centre during the outage, while police and St John said they did not encounter any problems.
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