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CENIC & Public Safety Power Shutoffs

CENIC & Public Safety Power Shutoffs

Parts of California are experiencing Public Safety Power Shutoffs (PSPS) initiated by PG&E and other public utility companies. In the case of a PSPS, CENIC’s Network Operations Center (NOC), which operates 24x7x365, will do whatever is within our power to alert sites to connectivity issues and to resolve them expeditiously, while working with the many telecommunications carriers that are our partners.

CENIC NOC STEPS TO POWER OUTAGE DIAGNOSIS AND RESTORATION

Our NOC is accustomed to resolving power outages that impact connectivity for our associates, especially during periods of inclement weather or, more recently, during the outbreaks of wildfires. We have a standard operating procedure for handling them. The steps below will be followed when the NOC suspects that service is interrupted due to a power outage:

Validate by dialing into our out-of-band modems to connect to site equipment. In the case that out-of-band modems are unreachable, it is highly likely that power issues exist.
NOC engineers reach out to site contacts to confirm that there is a power outage.
Once power is restored, network services typically restore as soon as CENIC’s customer premise equipment (CPE) powers up again, and we continuously monitor to ensure that this occurs correctly.
In the rare instances when service doesn’t restore, a CENIC NOC engineer troubleshoots with the relevant site contacts.

The PSPS approach recently adopted by power utilities is unique in that these power outages are initiated by the utilities, possibly with little or no advance notice. We know that our members are especially vulnerable in two ways:

PSPS impacting last-mile circuits, either from the telecommunication provider’s sites or at the member's site;
PSPS causing a catastrophic outage on the CalREN backbone network.

The NOC will remain in contact with our members throughout the outage and restoration process, regardless of the location of the outage, whether at the member site or another location on the path to the site. Our NOC will continue working to determine what additional measures we can put in place to address our current PSPS situation and similar events in the future. We will keep you apprised.

CALREN BACKBONE PREPAREDNESS

For the CalREN backbone, the NOC has engaged our co-location providers, all of whom have prepared for such events and, thus, we expect the probability of such a network outage to be quite low. CENIC’s NOC, our back-up NOC, and our commercial co-location facilities all have back-up power (UPS and generators).

In case of any emergency, the CENIC NOC should be contacted using the same escalation procedures that your networking leads would use for any issue. Contact information and the escalation path for the CENIC NOC can be found at https://cenic.org/network/noc-escalation.