Building a Network for the New Era of Endless Disruption

This Industry Viewpoint was authored by Todd Mussman, GTT Product Manager

Managing the ill effects of extreme weather events has unfortunately become a recurring part of network operations. Yet many enterprises plan as if such events are rare, leaving critical systems exposed when major disruptions occur. According to a recent S&P Global report, only one in five have a formal climate change adaptation plan, and fewer than half of those plan to act on it within the next decade.

This gap between preparation and reality has recently been laid bare by a string of severe disruptions. Storm Darragh swept across Europe leaving more than two million homes without power. In the U.S., Hurricane Helene created outages that lasted weeks in some regions.

For affected communities and organizations, network outages and the resulting lengthy recovery times can be devastating. Critical services stall, recovery drags and public safety risks climb. These failures reveal a hard truth: networks optimized for speed, demand and cost aren’t built to withstand the era of constant crisis. But resiliency also can’t be bolted on after the fact. It has to be embedded in the design as a core principle aligned with both operational and compliance requirements.

Why Traditional Network Design Falls Short

Most networks are built to handle everyday conditions with only brief, occasional disruptions. In reality, that often means:

• Single points of failure in access or aggregation layers
• Overreliance on terrestrial infrastructure with no alternative transport path
• Backup power systems that can keep networks going for hours instead of days or weeks

When storms, floods or wildfires damage fiber lines, existing network weaknesses can quickly surface. Even with various long-haul routes, a network remains vulnerable if local access loops or distribution nodes lack redundant power or backhaul. Furthermore, the failover paths that do exist are rarely secured to zero-trust or segmentation standards, creating exploitable vulnerabilities during a crisis.

Building Resilience into Connectivity

Network resiliency isn’t about zero failure. It means continuing to function at a minimum operational level during disruption. That requires multiple layers of diversity and redundancy, including:

• Connectivity diversity: Supplementing fiber with wireless options such as multi-threaded dual-SIM cellular and satellite links provides essential backup paths. These aren’t theoretical stopgaps. They must be provisioned, tested and be made ready for immediate switchover. Cellular backhaul can cover short-term gaps, while satellite links provide critical connectivity when terrestrial infrastructure can’t be reached. Security policies must extend to all backups, with encrypted channels and automated network segmentation applied during switchover.
• Extending redundancy beyond the core: Core networks are often engineered for resilience, but failures more commonly occur in the distribution layer or last mile. Building redundancy into these layers, and ensuring failover paths use different physical routes, can dramatically improve uptime during emergencies.
• Power resilience: Connectivity is of course useless without power. Whether it’s backup generators, fuel supplies or battery systems, plan for outages that could last weeks. Include fuel logistics, generator maintenance schedules and compliance with business continuity standards in your planning.

Managing Limited Bandwidth in a Crisis

When outages cut available capacity, prioritizing critical services is essential. SD-WAN, advanced Quality of Service (QoS) along with other tools and policies can dynamically prioritize traffic that keeps vital operations running.

In emergencies this means:

• Routing emergency calls and control system traffic over the most stable link
• Limiting non-essential applications, particularly those that consume a lot of bandwidth
• Using load balancing and dynamic path selection to maximize performance across overloaded links – especially cellular backhaul

In addition to keeping the right traffic flowing, these strategies can be pre-modeled and stress-tested based on past outage data to improve readiness.

Contingency Planning Grounded in Data

Since risk profiles vary widely by region, resilience measures must be tailored using location-specific historical outage and weather data. This can include:

• Coastal areas prone to hurricanes prioritizing satellite failover and hardened shelters in network equipment
• Flood-prone inland regions focusing on elevating gear above high-water marks and being able to deploy rapid wireless links when needed
• Fire-prone zones requiring redundant power systems with greater physical separation between facilities

Advanced approaches include combining GIS-based risk modeling with FEMA flood maps, NOAA storm surge predictions and ATIS/ITU resiliency benchmarks to pinpoint the optimal placement of equipment and backup routing paths.

Effective contingency planning anticipates multiple failures happening at once and outlines strategies for each scenario, whether it’s losing power and fiber together or facing cellular congestion alongside infrastructure damage. The aim isn’t just rapid reaction but having predefined actions ready to deploy as conditions change.

An Industry Imperative

Resilient network design is a collective responsibility. Public safety, emergency response, economic stability and everyday life hinge on keeping people connected in a crisis. That means carriers, service providers and enterprise IT teams must think beyond their own networks to help strengthen the wider ecosystem for all.

Forward-thinking operators are already building resilience into their core architecture from the outset. They’re stress-testing failover systems under real-world conditions, maintaining backup power supplies and putting intelligent traffic prioritization policies in place before the next storm season. Just as importantly, they’re building the business case by quantifying the economic cost of downtime versus the smaller investment in continuous availability.

The Takeaway

Disaster resilience means keeping communications operational through a crisis until full service is restored. Achieving this requires deliberate investment in route diversity, redundant systems, robust power preparedness and intelligent traffic management, all based on the specific risks each location faces and backed by region-specific risk modeling, security integration and compliance alignment.

The past few years have shown us what’s at stake. The next few will determine whether the industry adapts.

 

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Categories: Energy · Fiber Networks · Industry Viewpoint · Security · Wireless