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Silicon Valley Dispatches: What Happens When Our Communication Networks Go HayWired?
CURRENT PERSPECTIVES SILICON VALLEY DISPATCHES: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN OUR COMMUNICATION NETWORKS GO HAYWIRED?
By David Witkowski
[Editor’s Note: We welcome David Witkowski as a new columnist who will offer his perspectives on the current state of play in the wireless industry. We look forward to his many insights that will appear in the upcoming issues of the Proceedings.] In late 2015, the U.S. Geological Survey asked me to be co-author of a chapter in their next earthquake scenario, named HayWired, because it combines a hypothetical major earthquake on the Hayward Fault (in the San Francisco Bay Area) with an analysis of potential impacts to the Silicon Valley’s communication and data networking systems. The work was coordinated through Joint Venture Silicon Valley, a non-profit think tank where I serve as executive director of their Civic Technologies Initiative, which includes oversight of their wireless, wired broadband, and smart cities work. (I dislike the term “smart cities”, but that is a topic for a future column.) Having previously worked on disaster impact analysis and table-topping in the past — notably the Disaster Preparedness Initiative at JVSV in 2007, which later became the Disaster Management Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University’s Silicon Valley campus — the disaster scenario outlined by the USGS for HayWired intrigued me. The last time the San Francisco Bay Area experienced a major disaster was the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, sometimes called the “World Series earthquake” because it happened just as the third game of that series was starting. I was 100 miles away from the epicenter on that day, yet even at that distance the shaking was so violent it set off car alarms. We lost power, and long-distance phone circuits were jammed up, but most communications remained intact — because the 1989 earthquake was pre-Internet and there were not significant wireless communications to disrupt, certainly not wireless as we think of it today. Data networking was limited (at best) to 9,600 bits-per-second connections over dial-up modems. In 1989, the Plain Old Telephone System (POTS) was the technology for voice, and the only thing carried on coaxial cables were local television stations and some paid channels. Dissolve, as they say in Hollywood, to present day. Our lives are hyper-connected, and companies with the highest stock market capitalizations are internet-focused companies that provide the connections and connected services we’ve come to depend on. The Dot Com boom of the late 1990s was enabled by dial-up modems, ISDN, and Fractional T-1 circuits. The current market boom is enabled by 4G LTE and Wi-Fi. The epicenter of this economic boom is Silicon Valley, located a scant 25 miles away from the epicenter of the 1989 earthquake, and only 25 miles away from another (and potentially
USGS – Hayward Scenario Shakemap. (Courtesy USGS)
even more damaging) seismic structure known as the Hayward Fault. Since 1989, the Bay Area has dealt with wildfires, winter storms, and precautionary electric power shutoffs during fire season, but effects from these were relatively mild compared to the extensive damage caused by the 1989 earthquake. Historically, the Hayward fault has experienced a massive earthquake on average about every 150 years — and the last Hayward earthquake happened in 1868. The Bay Area is overdue for a major earthquake, and when it happens it will quiet literally shake the Silicon Valley to its core. Previous USGS disaster scenarios looked at the effects to physical infrastructure; roads, bridges, water, sanitation, and electrical power. HayWired extends this to consider the effects to communication networks and data systems. For me, the most challenging — yet most interesting — part of the process was developing a viable scenario by looking at other disasters. For example, we know that earthquakes in other countries had certain impacts to communications and data, but would those impacts map over to a U.S. earthquake? What would be different, and what would be similar? We know that fire-following earthquake is a major damage vector from earthquakes, so could we use the western U.S. wildfires as proxies? Again: what would be different, what would be similar? Backup power for telecommunications infrastructure is a major issue, and is known problem in the aftermath of hurricanes, so how would telecom backup power fare during a Bay Area earthquake? The other challenging — and more frustrating — part of the process was trying to describe an increasingly complex telecommunications system into something a non-engineer could digest. The telecommunications world of 2021 is no longer neatly divided into wired telephones and cable TV. Twisted-pair copper wiring can carry POTS, POTS plus various flavors of Digital Subscriber Line (xDSL), or just xDSL where the voice telephone service is converted from digital signals by equipment at the subscriber site. Likewise, coaxial cable is no longer just for RF television channels, but instead carries high-throughput Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification (DOCSIS) data signals which provide both broadband and entertainment. And increasingly, homes and businesses are served data
USGS HayWired Scenario Cellular Site Impact Forecast (Courtesy USGS) over fiber optic lines. Smartphones still access voice, texting, and data via cellular sites, but also via Wi-Fi connected to the internet via xDSL, cable, or fiber. And our definition of what constitutes a “telephone” is constantly evolving as users shift to app-based communication such as Messenger, Facetime, WhatsApp, WeChat, Skype, and a host of other apps. Many of our findings were interesting if not sometimes counter-intuitive. At first, we thought that large lattice towers would likely fail most readily, but after an analysis in light of the TIA-222-H standard we discovered that large lattice towers — guyed or free-standing — are in fact very seismically stable. The analysis (conducted by the leaders of the TIA-222-H committee) found that — absent landslides or other damage to the foundations — lattice towers in the heaviest shaking zones will likely remain standing. (Whether the appurtenances on the tower are damaged or dislodged is another discussion.) Monopoles, on the other hand, could be damaged by shaking if they are heavily loaded with radios and antennas. We found that
many cellular sites are installed on buildings, which can be vulnerable to seismic damage, and if a building is “redtagged” (unsafe to enter due to seismic damage) there may be no way to access the cellular equipment to make repairs. It is often said that “It takes a lot of wires to support wireless,” and our analysis finds that, indeed, it is failure of the wires that will cause cellular sites to go off the air. Loss of electrical power, and damage from fire or pole toppling to the fiber optic lines that provide data to cellular sites, combined with seismic damage, could take as many as one in four monopoles off the air. We also realized that many users are not well-prepared for loss of telecommunications. xDSL, cable, and fiber optic broadband networks are not powered by the internet service provider (ISP) but rather by electrical circuits at the subscriber’s home or business. Without a backup power source if the power goes out, so does the broadband. Broadband networks (especially cable broadband) are susceptible to power outages that affect the hubs, distribution amplifiers, and repeaters in the network’s upstream wiring. All of this is hard for me, an engineer with four decades of experience in communications, to describe and organize. What will happen when millions of people in the Bay Area, many of whom have never experienced a major disaster affecting their ability to communicate, are offline for hours or possibly days? The project took six years to complete, and the level of effort proved to be, quite frankly, stunning. My co-author, Dr. Anne Wein of the USGS, and I spent several years reviewing reports on effects to communication networks and data systems in disaster scenarios and after-action reports from seismic events, such as the 2011 Tohoku Japan earthquake, and non-seismic events such as Hurricane Michael’s impacts in 2018, which took down 1,357 cellular sites across Florida, Alabama, and Georgia. During the project I spent untold hours on phone and Zoom calls with scientists and industry experts, planned and hosted two full-day workshops that convened wired and wireless industry experts from a variety of disciplines, and defended our analysis and assertions during numerous editing and peer-review cycles, until at last receiving an email announcing the work was done, and the publication was live on the USGS website. The telecommunications chapter, known formally as Chapter S: The HayWired Scenario—Telecommunications and Information Communication Technology, is part of the HayWired Earthquake Scenario — Societal Consequences (Volume 3) release, is available online at https://pubs. er.usgs.gov/publication/sir20175013V3. I do hope you will read it, and that you might find this an interesting example of the kind of work an RCA member gets up each morning to do.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Witkowski is an author, advisor, and strategist who works at the intersection between local government and the telecommunication industry. He is a Fellow of the Radio Club of America, an IEEE Senior Member, the Founder and CEO of Oku Solutions LLC, and is the Executive Director of Civic Technologies Initiatives at Joint Venture Silicon Valley. He served in the U.S. Coast Guard and earned his B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Davis. He held leadership roles for companies ranging from Fortune 500 multi-nationals to early-stage startups, and currently serves as Co-Chair of the Deployment Working Group at IEEE Future Networks, Co-Chair of the GCTC Wireless SuperCluster at NIST, as a member of the Connected Communities Forum at the Wireless Broadband Alliance, and as an Expert Advisor to the California Emerging Technology Fund. He is the author of several books and many articles about the state of the industry.
