GREENFIELD — In an effort to gain a clearer understanding of the Greenfield Community Energy and Technology (GCET) internet outage that impacted roughly 1,800 of the telecommunications company’s 2,200 customers earlier this month, city councilors questioned GCET General Manager John Lunt this week.
Lunt addressed City Council on Wednesday, explaining that the outage was initially caused by a “rare” and “unpredictable” hardware failure in the company’s router and later persisted when installation of new firmware in the new router caused “bugs” in the system.
“GCET staff worked very hard over long hours to resolve the outage and I appreciate their efforts. This was a frustrating and disrupting event for GCET customers, which included the city. The outage also exposed a vulnerability in emergency communications for residents who are reliable on the phones, which cannot make emergency calls without internet service,” Mayor Ginny Desorgher said at the start of the meeting. “We will be working with GCET and our public safety departments to address this and other concerns that emerged during the outage.”
Lunt added that GCET lost approximately 12 customers during the outage, but explained that the company has since implemented a more thorough communications strategy and has offered credits to GCET customers for the full span of the outage.
“Some [people’s internet] stayed up throughout the entire incident, but it was disruptive to everyone. So in the end, we decided the fairest thing to do was to offer credits to everybody equal to the entire 76-hour span,” Lunt said. “I would rate our communications performance during the outage as poor. I think that the systems that we had, which is a pool-based system, worked fine for when a few people go down and you have to get in contact with people, but it just didn’t work [in this situation].”
While many councilors, such as At-Large Councilors Sara Brown and John Garrett, focused their questions to Lunt on possible outage-prevention measures that GCET could implement in the future — such as backup internet systems at the Greenfield Public Library or other buildings — other councilors questioned the age of the router and why it had not been replaced sooner.
Discussing potential outage prevention and mitigation strategies, Lunt explained that there’s no ability to completely remove risk of failure from the system and it is not financially feasible, nor practical, for GCET to keep an extra $100,000 router on standby. He said the company, in the event of an outage, could hire a courier service or send a GCET representative to Lexington, Kentucky, to pick up the new router and transport it back.
Lunt also noted that both the malfunctioned router and the new router are two years away from their end of service, which he explained is different from a piece of technology’s end of life. He said “end of life” means a product is no longer manufactured or sold by a vendor, but may still receive service. “End of service,” on the other hand, means all vendor services are ceased.
“The best example is most people’s iPhones in this room are end-of-life, because end-of-life doesn’t come because something is old and broken-down; it’s because they want to sell something new,” Lunt said. “End of service is what counts, because as long as things are in service, they’re considered top-line products that are within their life cycle from the manufacturer. There’s two years left. The odds of it happening on the other router are no greater than it was happening on the first router.”
When Lunt explained that GCET planned to return before the council next year with a capital request for a router, Precinct 1 City Councilor Katherine Golub questioned the timeline on the equipment’s replacement, noting that by the time the request is approved and processed, the router will have reached — or be at the cusp of — its end of service.
Golub also said she had trouble “trusting” the company, noting that it already received more than $1 million in American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding in 2021, and despite previous approved requests for funding, has not yet completed its North Build project. North Build aims to bring service to the Bernardston Road, Colrain Road, Meadow Lane and Green River Road areas as well as the area of Leyden and Country Club roads.
In response, Lunt explained that while GCET now operates off its own revenue, it relied heavily on city funding and bonding in its first few years as a start-up. He added that the company is expanding its service as fast and cost-efficiently as it can given its revenue.
“We work really hard to make this work in Greenfield — everything slows down when there’s no access to capital, because we have to stop and figure out what we need to do. It is the single-biggest issue facing GCET,” Lunt said. “You have a small group of people who have run a network that, even with this outage, is still at 99.99% uptime that competes successfully against some of the biggest companies in the world. But if it continues to be starved of capital, that will no longer be true.”
City Council President Lora Wondolowski, noting that she works in Amherst and experiences internet outages with Comcast “all the time,” thanked Lunt and GCET for doing “an amazing job” and for working hard to restore service.