Qwest fiber severed in Eagle Harbor, disrupts Bainbridge for over 26 hours

A contractor installing pilings in Eagle Harbor severed the submarine cable that goes from Bainbridge to Seattle. This main fiber route carries Centurylink voice and internet data. But more importantly, fibers in that cable are leased to other entities to carry cell phone traffic, LTE data (cellular internet), (Verizon, ATT, etc) and private networks (like NoaNet our upstream internet carrier). KPUD and NoaNet have an advanced network with redundancy. Even though our primary feed goes over this fiber, we were automatically rerouted and went to Olympia instead. We had no downtime over the last 26 hours due to this extraordinary event. On Bainbridge, most cell towers were offline today. Reception was limited to just a few towers (not served by Qwest). The Safeway couldn’t process debit cards and the lines were literally 20 people deep because checkout was so slow. We depend on quality, reliable internet, which is what KPUD (a public entity) provides us. This cable severing should not have been able to disrupt communication as it did; the implication is that our cellular communications services for life safety on Bainbridge are not single point of failure safe.