ASTRID TETRA network withstands severe weather and power failures
Severe weather caused last Friday in Belgium for power outages and flooding. Nevertheless, the ASTRID TETRA network continued to work flawlessly.
This proves that even with elimination of electricity, the TETRA network continues to function properly.
It is known: when severe winter weather hits Belgium, the chances are high that there will be structural shortage of electricity. Therefore, the government has drawn up a plan in which some provinces are put temporarily without power. This, in order to prevent a nationwide power outage.
In case of power outages numerous networks are hit. The ASTRID systems can accommodate such power interruption and this was reaffirmed on 15 January. Thanks to the emergency batteries fitted on each antenna mast, the mast can work smoothly and assures communication between emergency services for a long time. On Friday 15th, emergency services were extremely busy. This can be read in the statistics: Around 10 am, ASTRID received 78% more traffic than on a normal day.
Snow and power failures
On the 15th, twenty-three municipalities in the province of Liege were faced with blackouts. The failures were caused by heavy snowfall. Snow-covered trees buckled and arrived into power lines. At provincial level, the state of emergency was declared.
The ASTRID network continued to operate completely as normal. In the province of Liege about 15 masts affected by the power outage. Some of these masts were affected, even up to 12 hours. They all switched automatically to their emergency batteries and remained available. For those masts that were affected the longest ASTRID preventively installed an emergency generator.
An ASTRID transmission mast is able to continue to operate for at least 8 hours during a power outage, and a lot longer if there is economy in communication and when talk-groups are economically used.
Over the whole of Belgium, a total of some forty transmitters at any given time were affected by the power failure so that they had to switch to their batteries.
Flooding
In the province of Flanders heavy rainfall and melting snow caused a significant flooding, particularly in the provinces of Flemish Brabant, East Flanders and Antwerp. Rivers burst their banks, houses were flooded and several municipalities proclaimed the contingency plan.
Because the emergency services were deployed en masse, the ASTRID network in the affected regions had to handle twice as much traffic as on a normal day. Here and there queuing on the network occurred. The time required to establish a call on the network in this case was longer than the conventional 300 milliseconds. In this case, the call will then be placed in the queue.
In Antwerp, some masts were unavailable for a few minuted between midnight and one o'clock in the morning. This was due to interference on the transmission lines by the snowfall. The exact cause is now being investigated by the supplier.
Based on the live test of January 15, the BIPT (Belgium Telecom Agency) will dedicate a complete analysis of the availability of various telecom operators.
