07/15/2026
This year so far we have struggled through an incredible number of scattered storms in Arkansas. Way more than normal. These have caused a lot of small outages on our network and a few bigger ones. The nature of these storms often means it can be bright and sunny in one area of the network, and storming just a few miles away and can still cause an outage. We have examined the reasons the storms have caused these outages and they boil down to 3 main things.
1. Rain fade on some of the higher frequency links between towers.
2. Power outages.
3. Lightning damage.
We have a plan to tackle these weaknesses on our network. The first thing is we have a short distance 80ghz link that feeds the whole network that should be more resilient in rain than it is. This link has caused several short outages. We will be adding a backup 6ghz link to this path that will continue to work through rain events. We plan to have this installed in the next week.
We are also working on improving battery backup systems, standby generators and working on grounding systems, to help with power outages and lightning protection.
