Telecom Informer
by The Prophet
Aloha, and greetings from the Central Office!
I'm on the Big Island of Hawaii, on the east coast, in an area called Leilani Estates. It's a sleepy, laid back place near Pā hoa, down the road from Hilo, on a part of the island far from where most tourists come. In fact, very few ever venture into Leilani Estates, which is probably why you haven't heard of it. However, it's on the eastern slopes of Kīlauea, which creates some conditions best described as exciting.
I'm normally dealing with trees, drunks, and backhoes. Hawaii's network planners get all of that plus an active volcano that occasionally decides to rearrange the outside plant with a few hundred million tons of molten rock. In 2018, Kīlauea's lower East Rift Zone went on a 107-day rampage, resurfaced roughly 35 square kilometers, wiped out over 700 structures, and buried around 30 to 50 miles of roads. Along the way, it destroyed about 900 utility poles and cut off the island's geothermal plant, which had been providing a big chunk of the area's electric power.
The volcano didn't "target" infrastructure, but utility corridors are laid out where people live and where the roads are. Lava just followed the same terrain we did. Highway 132 and 137 (the main arteries for Puna) were covered with molten rock. Once the roads disappear under tens of feet of 'a'ā and pāhoehoe, your standard "roll a truck" playbook goes right out the window.
The electric grid and telecom plant in the flow field weren't just damaged; they stopped existing! Poles, copper, fiber, water lines, the whole nine yards were entombed in rock hot enough to set utility poles on fire at ground level. In one neighborhood, crews watched wooden poles quietly smolder from the heat still coming off adjacent flows. You don't learn how to handle that in a generic "outside plant" safety video.
Lava also created lots of little "islands" called kīpuka. Houses and poles in some pockets never got hit, but everything upstream feeding them was gone. From the customer's point of view, the line "looked fine." From the utility side, those pockets might as well have been on the moon. You can't jumper around a 40-foot wall of rock with a ladder and a few spans of cable. Assessment and materials moved by helicopter instead of bucket truck, with air quality monitors keeping an eye on SO2 and vog the whole time.
Once the lava cooled enough to walk on (more or less), the real fun started: rebuilding on top of rock that's still hot inside. Basalt is an excellent insulator. The crust can be cool enough for boots while the interior sits at pizza-oven temperatures for months. The usual "dig a hole in dirt, drop in a pole" doesn't work when there is no dirt. So engineers started drilling "rock sockets' - deep shafts into the flow, then dropping poles and back-filling with high-strength concrete. It's slow, noisy, and every hole is a geology surprise. Some spots are solid; others hit voids and lava tubes.
Undergrounding (the thing people love to demand after every storm) makes even less sense on an active lava field. You can't locate, splice, or reroute conduit that's 40 feet under rock. In Puna, regulators and the utility ended up deciding that overhead 69 kV back into the geothermal plant was actually the resilient choice. If the volcano comes back for a second round, you sacrifice a line, move the poles, and try again. The key isn't making plant immortal; it's making it replaceable.
Topology mattered as much as materials. Before 2018, a lot of Puna's telecom backhaul was classic rural spur: one fiber bundle marching out from Hilo into the district. Cut it at the wrong choke point and every community downstream goes dark. When lava crossed those roads, that's exactly what happened.
Since then, Hawaiian Telcom has been busily closing loops. In 2023, they spent about $1.5 million to stitch a 25-mile gap between Volcano and Pāhala, completing an East Hawaii fiber ring. That way, if a fiber cut occurs, service can be routed the other direction. Federal Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program (BEAD) money (roughly $149 million for Hawaii alone) is also being shoveled into rural broadband under the "Internet for All" banner. Connect Kākou, the statewide broadband effort, is trying to use that pile of cash to make sure the next eruption hits as much fiber as it wants and still doesn't knock the whole island offline. That's the theory, anyway. Here on the ground, fiber to the home is available throughout much of Leilani Estates, but upstream infrastructure is the bottleneck. There are all sorts of goofy edge cases like two houses on the same street having service available, but a third being outside of the coverage area. Eventually, fiber to the home will be available everywhere, but the operative word is "eventually."
Fiber, poles, and rock sockets are still terrestrial. When the ground is literally moving, you also need something that isn't on the ground. That brings us to the microwave and satellite side of the house. Puna has a legacy of big, Cold War-era towers from the old AT&T Long Lines network, back when people worried about nuclear war cutting toll routes. Those sites now make handy anchor points for modern microwave. In 2018, and later during the Maui fires, carriers leaned hard on point-to-point microwave hops to jump over areas where poles had burned or fiber turned into slag. The FCC handed out emergency authorizations to light up temporary links, which were used to fill the gaps.
Microwave was only half the problem; power was the other half. Many remote cell and relay sites stayed up on diesel generators until access roads vanished under lava or fire. Once the road is gone, though, so is your fuel truck. After 2018, there have been more deployments of solar-plus-battery "hybrid" sites where the generator becomes a backup to the backup. It's a lot easier to fly in a pallet of batteries occasionally than to sling diesel every few days by helicopter.
The really new piece, which didn't exist in 2018, is the satellite overlay: Starlink and friends. In Maui's 2023 fires, various groups hauled in dozens of Starlink terminals on very short notice, and later reports talk about hundreds of kits across the island as relief scaled up. Park a dish at a distribution center, connect it to a generator, and suddenly that parking lot has enough bandwidth to serve the entire area. Emergency managers used those links to ship giant drone imagery sets and GIS data for analysis.
For the next round of volcanic fun on the Big Island, the plan is to not wait until after the disaster. There are already subsidy programs quietly helping rural households in hard-to-reach areas to put Starlink dishes on their own roofs. From a resilience point of view, every one of those terminals is a tiny, community-owned "cell tower in space" backhaul path. If the poles on the street burn, the dish doesn't care. However, the area is densely forested and - adding another wrinkle - the area's property crime rate is fairly high (anything that isn't nailed down is often stolen). So the jury is still out on how well this will work.
Even more interesting is the direct-to-cell work: satellites with LTE base stations onboard, talking straight to ordinary phones on the ground. Tests are underway in Hawaii with national carriers and experimental licenses. If that pans out, someone trapped on a kīpuka with a phone and a clear view of the sky could receive wireless emergency alerts and send a text with their GPS coordinates even if every tower in line of sight has fallen over. The last mile literally becomes the last few hundred kilometers of space.
Meanwhile, the state's own radio network (known as HIWIN) is being hardened with satellite backhaul options. The idea is simple: if microwave from the mountaintop radio site back to the core fails, a Starlink dish takes over and keeps police and fire repeaters on the air. No matter what happens between the tower and the ground, the tower still has a path back to dispatch.
All of this costs real money, and regulators finally realized you don't get resilience by paying utilities to rebuild the same brittle stuff every time lava or wind knocks it down. Hawaii's Public Utilities Commission moved electric utilities to performance-based regulation: instead of just earning on capital they pour into more poles, they get paid based on outcomes like uptime and restoration time. In theory, it makes microgrids, solar-hybrid sites, and fiber rings just as financially attractive as another row of wood sticks in a known hazard zone.
There's also the "soft" side of resilience that doesn't live on a pole at all. The Pāhoa Lava Zone Museum keeps the story of 2018 front and center for locals and tourists. It's well worth a visit, and contains all of the original exhibits from the U.S. Park Service visitor center destroyed in the 2018 eruption. Community "digital detective" campaigns log where broadband actually works versus where the maps claim it works, steering BEAD and other funds into the right census blocks. People in Puna may be living with lava risk, but with decent connectivity they can at least work, study, and see a doctor over video without driving an hour to Hilo.
So what can the K¯lauea eruption teach you, even if you don't have a volcano in your backyard? A few things:
- Linear, single-path networks are a network design that the planet doesn't respect. If there is one spur, a volcano (or backhoe, or ice storm) will eventually find it. Ring topologies are more expensive, but they're table stakes for resilience.
- Whatever you think of as "hardening' only gets you so far. On a long enough timeline, nature wins. Design things so they can be moved, sacrificed, or bypassed rather than banking on armor.
- Finally, satellite networks are gaining capabilities fast. In places where infrastructure is untrustworthy, putting your backhaul in orbit may be the only way to get to "always on" for critical services.
Hawaii is trying to become the first fully fibered state while simultaneously embracing microwave, microgrids, and LEO satellites. If they pull it off, Puna will be a case study in how to keep phones and packets moving on a planet that's still under construction.
And on that note, an alarm just lit up on the backup generator panel here, which probably means somebody in Facilities forgot to order fuel again. I'm off to make a few calls before the lights go out. Stay safe, keep your loops redundant, and if the ground under your outside plant starts to glow, your life is about to get interesting.