COLDWATER — An extremely rare series of events left 1,200-plus Coldwater Board of Public Utilities telecommunications customers without high-speed internet for under five hours Tuesday and into Wednesday morning.
Telecommunications manager Bob Worley said issues started Tuesday at 12:25 p.m. when a backup battery went into test mode, cutting service for eight minutes. “The battery had just been replaced,” he said.
The outage caused one of three servers to “Start taking errors that it could not recover from,” Worley explained.
The system continued to work until around 9 p.m. when two servers affected by the compounding errors began telling the only working server that the good server was operating in error and to shut down.
CBPU manager Paul Jakubczak said Aspen Wireless, the company that constructed the system, had technicians in Coldwater.
Telephone alerts sent them to the Jay Street operation facility, and they began rebuilding the server. The server went back online just before 2 a.m., putting all customers back online.
Jakubczak said Aspen completed rebuilds on the redundant servers by Wednesday, and the entire system was back to normal.
Worley said the system crash was so rare it would be the equivalent of five contractors severing fiber lines at five locations at the same time by accident. “Precautions have been made. It shouldn’t happen again ever. Shouldn’t,” Worley said.
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Contractor Aspen Wireless began constructing a $4.2 million city-wide fiber network in 2022 for a utility control system that is also used to provide 1 gigabyte high-speed services to residential and commercial customers.
Installations continue, with CBPU expected to close down its cable television and cable internet services in 2024, converting to an all-fiber system.
Contact Don Reid: dReid@Gannett.com.
