GREENFIELD — After GCET, the city’s telecommunications company, announced a “serious hardware fault” on Monday night that resulted in two-thirds of customers losing internet, service has been restored for the city’s schools, public service agencies and businesses, GCET General Manager John Lunt said, with more customers still without Wi-Fi.
Lunt said the loss of internet was caused by a significant hardware failure in the company’s main router, meaning that to restore service for all GCET customers, the company must first replace this router. He said he expects that service will resume for all customers Wednesday afternoon or evening. GCET, which stands for Greenfield Community Energy and Technology, has approximately 2,200 customers throughout the city.
“It is a rare occurrence. The router has worked flawlessly for almost 10 years, and it should have worked for another five before we needed to address anything. But, occasionally, faults do happen. There is a piece of hardware within the router that cannot be replaced on its own, because it’s integrated into the router,” Lunt said in a phone interview on Tuesday afternoon. “Unfortunately, the problem happened late enough in the day yesterday that it was too late to get it overnighted last night, so it’s being overnighted today. We will install the new router [on Wednesday] at some point in the afternoon.”
Some parts of the router remain undamaged, Lunt said, allowing crews to bring up “functional pathways” within the system and restore service to some IP addresses.
Although the router is valued at an estimated $100,000, Lunt explained that GCET has an insurance policy that will cover its replacement. According to Lunt, the problem could not have been predicted or detected in diagnostics tests.
“We’re working as hard as we can to get people up as soon as possible, and if we can get additional people connected in the interim, we will do that. We’ve been working non-stop; we worked late into the evening last night, and we were up and at it at a little after 6 a.m. this morning,” Lunt said. “We know people need internet and we’re doing everything we can to get people connected.”
Although the Greenfield Public Library on Main Street lost service on Monday night, it was packed with residents who were hoping to connect to the internet on Tuesday, according to Library Director Anna Bognolo.
“Everybody was coming here. The phone was ringing off the hook from anyone who was a residential GCET customer. … It was packed,” Bognolo said, explaining that the library’s significant public use reminded her of the facility’s popularity during the pandemic. “I’m really glad that we could help fill that need in the community. … We proved to people that we’re about more than just books.”
In a Facebook post Tuesday afternoon, GCET claimed that a short-term “partial fix” would allow an additional 600 customers to reconnect.
“We have continued to work to restore service while we wait for our replacement router to arrive. We have instituted a short-term partial fix that should allow an additional 600 customers to reconnect. Due to the nature of the hardware fault, we are not able to direct or determine which customers will reconnect,” the company wrote. “We truly appreciate your patience during what we understand is a difficult and frustrating time.”
In an interview Tuesday, the mayor’s Chief of Staff Erin Anhalt commended GCET for its efforts to remedy the outage and expressed relief that GCET has insurance.
“We are proud of the team at GCET for all the hard work they have put in over the past 24 hours,” Anhalt said. “We are also glad that they have insurance for this type of hardware, which is 9 and a half years old, nearing end-of-life for enterprise-grade routers.”