Research shows that natural disasters are increasing— of the 10 years with the most natural disasters, 9 were in the last decade. From 1980 to 2024, the U.S. averaged 9 events per year, while the annual average for the most recent 5 years is 23.
Communication service providers (CSPs) play a vital role in disaster recovery and ensuring connectivity in both urban and rural areas, and this role is essential for effective emergency response.
From enabling real-time data collection from the RAN and core to the edge via Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, to facilitating early warnings and damage assessment, to supporting telemedicine for remote medical assistance and providing public alert systems for timely evacuation instructions, CSPs are at the forefront of innovation, leveraging data from various network sources to gain deeper insights and business intelligence to ensure connectivity and effective management of disaster recovery—whether man-made or natural—at any location.
Racing to the Rescue
In recent times, the increase in natural disasters has proven to be a year-round phenomenon instead of a rare event, as stated in this recent AT&T podcast on natural disaster recovery. Established network connectivity can positively impact the speed at which emergency response teams perform during natural disasters. The immediate aftermath of a catastrophic event can be hectic, producing multiple and simultaneous triaging activities: First responders need to coordinate search and rescue missions, hospitals need to communicate with emergency services and transfer critical patient data, families are desperate to know if their loved ones are safe, and businesses need to assess damage and initiate recovery. All of this hinges on one thing: a functioning and optimized communication network.
Urban Versus Rural Connectivity Challenges
Overcoming connectivity challenges requires a multifaceted approach, including robust and redundant infrastructure, diverse communication technologies (such as satellite and mobile solutions), resilient power systems, and well-defined disaster preparedness and response plans using observability tools to generate real-time insights. But different challenges exist for urban and rural areas.
Urban areas may have many challenges, but unique challenges may exist when there is extreme congestion that can hinder priority access for first responders during emergencies. On the other hand, urban areas may benefit from quicker restoration efforts because of their robust infrastructure, while rural areas with sparse populations over vast geographical distances can make restoration more complex and costly.
Ensuring that these communities always have access to reliable communication, especially during a natural disaster, assures equitable access to life-saving information and resources.
Assuring Network Availability with Real-time Observability
Assuring continuous network availability, especially during natural disasters, is a complex challenge for CSPs. But CSPs can achieve the observability required with consistent focus on network resiliency and redundancy by pursuing a deep understanding of the communications and performance between service, infrastructure, and characteristics, regardless of the physical location of the data, to attain predictive insights and ensure their networks can withstand extreme conditions in any crisis. For example, implementing robust monitoring tools to continuously track network performance and ascertain network uptime and availability is essential and can be achieved with the following:
- Real-time network monitoring: Implement robust monitoring tools to continuously track network performance, identify anomalies, and detect issues before they escalate into outages. Automated alerts are essential.
- Preventive maintenance: Regularly inspect, update, and replace aging or faulty hardware. Keep firmware and software up to date with the latest security patches and performance improvements.
- Predictive maintenance: Utilize artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tools that can analyze network data to predict potential failures, allowing for proactive intervention.
Observability is key to determining the cause of congestion and service degradation, as well as quantifying the customer experience, which together can deliver a clearer view into network performance. Ultimately, these insights can be used to develop disaster response and business continuity plans.
By integrating these options into a holistic network design and disaster recovery strategy from the onset, CSPs can significantly enhance their network's availability and resilience, even in the face of natural disasters, and leverage powerful new tools such as AI and machine learning (ML) to assist in mapping out network complexity and uncovering blind spots.
AI-Ready Actionable Business Intelligence for CSPs
NETSCOUT’s Automated Analytics is an intelligent automation engine that runs millions of iterative sequences to reveal the root cause of issues that impact service quality. This advanced solution utilizes AI/ML algorithms fortified with more than 30 years of domain knowledge from service providers around the globe, driven by NETSCOUT’s Adaptive Service Intelligence (ASI) Smart Data to provide actionable business intelligence.
NETSCOUT Omnis Automation enables CSPs to identify critical assets and network dependencies before disaster strikes. This knowledge is crucial during an emergency because it allows CSPs to identify actions that will restore service to urban and rural areas while accelerating services to first responders and restoring critical infrastructure. By building more observability into systems at the onset, CSPs can respond more quickly to outages and prevent network disruptions during a natural disaster, which in many cases can be the difference between life and death.
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