Mountain Village Broadband experiences extended town-wide internet outage
At 7:13 a.m. on Saturday, August 28, 2021, the Town of Mountain Village experienced a town-wide outage in its broadband internet service. Town of Mountain Village employees immediately went to work to address the problem together with its third-party internet provider Mammoth Networks.
It was determined that there was an accidental cut to the fiber on the north route of the town’s fiber network. When the primary line failed, the town’s broadband system failed to switch over to its back up line due to a coding error in the software system provided by a third-party vendor.
Town staff worked tirelessly on Saturday to assess the status of both fiber lines and understand and solve the coding issue. The coding issue was resolved by 4:30 p.m. and the fiber cut was repaired by 6 p.m. Saturday evening.
“Sometimes, unfortunately, the best of plans fail,” said Jim Soukup, the town’s chief technology officer. “This is the first long-term internet outage we have had in almost two years, and our team learned some important lessons. Providing reliable 1-gigabit internet is a top priority for the town and we are working to try to prevent such a long-term connection failure again in the future.”
In late 2019, the town hired Mammoth Networks to a redundant fiber network, meaning the town is served by two different routes originating from different locations (Albuquerque and Denver) that are intended to back the other line up should one route fail. The town primarily uses its north route (from Denver) to serve customers. The south line was fully functional during Saturday’s outage, but the software coding issue prevented the town’s system from switching over to it.
The Mountain Village Broadband team is debriefing with Mammoth Networks this week to further understand what happened in order to try to prevent such an outage in the future.
Saturday’s internet outage highlighted the importance of residents signing up for the town’s text message notification service. The town’s communications department uses text messaging as the first method in notifying the public of outages, closures or safety concerns.
To sign up for the system please visit bit.ly/MVNotifications. It is recommended that you provide your service address and email address when signing up as it allows for the town to provide geo-targeted notifications based on location in Mountain Village should the need arise.
