Minister O’Donovan meets telecommunications industry CEOs following Storm Éowyn

The Minister for Arts, Media, Communications, Culture and Sport, Patrick O’Donovan, today met with CEOs and senior managers of mobile phone and broadband operators as well as representatives from Telecommunications Industry Ireland (TII) to discuss the recent impact of Storm Éowyn on telecommunications infrastructure, the industry’s response and restoration works and their future plans to improve the networks resilience to emergency weather events.

The estimated effect of Storm Éowyn on the national telecommunications userbase was the largest in ComReg’s recording history:

• peak loss of fixed services was 10% of users without service
• peak impact to mobile service was 35% of users experiencing some level of degradation

Repair and restoration work has returned services to all mobile customers. Most fixed service customers and the majority of fixed operator networks have been restored. Repair and restoration of fibre networks is ongoing in certain areas where the storm did significant damage – some 0.21% of fixed service subscribers remain without service as of 16:00 Thursday 13 February.

In today’s meeting, Minister O’Donovan expressed his gratitude for the hard work undertaken in challenging circumstances and conditions by staff in the telecommunications industry repairing infrastructure and fibre lines.

Minister O’Donovan said:

Telecommunications operators expressed their gratitude for the support provided to the industry by Government and the National Emergency Coordination Group – including the provision of 10 generators by Poland following Ireland’s activation of the European Union Civil Protection Mechanism. These generators were used to provide mobile services to citizens in some of the worst hit areas in the west of Ireland.

Minister O’Donovan requested written proposals from operators for improving their network resilience and storm response processes.

The department will incorporate learnings from Storm Éowyn into its plans for weather emergency preparedness and continue to engage with the Commission for Communications Regulation (Comreg) and operators to formalise storm response processes and the roles all organisations will play in improving resilience, restoring connectivity and interacting with the national emergency response structures.

As part of the transition to recovery phase in the national response to Storm Éowyn the Cross-Departmental Recovery Group was established. The Group, chaired by the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications, is coordinating the final actions to restore telecommunications and broadband to those experiencing outages. This transition is in line with established interdepartmental and interagency structures for Strategic Emergency Management.