The New Zealand city of Christchurch is still suffering connectivity issues as the nation continues its search for survivors following what is thought to be its worst earthquake yet.

 

New Zealand Telecom said disruption to landlines and mobile services and widespread power outages were still being felt throughout the city and surrounding suburbs and that "large parts of the network are still working off backup power".

 

"The mobile network remains significantly affected," Telecom said on its site today, more than 24-hours following the event. "A number of cell sites are inoperative with others still heavily congested." 

 

"All central city cell sites that are operational have been connected to generators to keep them running. We have deployed two COWs (Cell Sites on Wheels) to critical areas to boost mobile coverage and we are looking to deploy additional COWs from around the country. We are also deploying technicians from around New Zealand to assist in the restoration of telcommunicati9ons services int eh Canterbury region.

 

DatacenterDynamics heard from two data center hosting operators yesterday. Both said services were sustained but backup generator power was being relied on.

 

Net24 technical director Nikolai Schupbach said Net24’s data center building received some damage but fiber links were up and operations were being sustained.

 

"All our system are operational," Schupbach said. "We have sustained some building damage (liquefaction around the building, some minor inside) but all our services are online, all our fiber links are up and we have not had any major equipment damage."

 

"We are currently running on generator (power), and expect to run on generator for at least the next 24 hours."

 

Digiweb operates two data centers in Christchurch. Both are connected by two 10Gbps links, which allows them to operate in production (live SAN replication and production irrespective of servers).

 

Digiweb Group managing director Adrian Grand said its operations experienced no unscheduled outages but "we shut services down only where we migrated from Christchurch to another center).