Hurricane Irma: C3 TETRA Network in St. Maarten Partly Restored

The C3 TETRA network, the mission-critical communications network in the Dutch Antilles, operated by Critical Communications Caribbean (C3), formerly known as Zenitel Caribbean has partly been restored allowing customers to communicate in some areas.

The network located on the isle of St. Maarten contains of two sites that cover a large portion of the Dutch part of the Isle. Fortunately, the main site was not damaged severely and was in operations short after the storm left the isle.

Furthermore, all microwave connections to other sites were broken because the hurricane blew away the installed radios and antennas. Meanwhile, C3 managed to restore one link on the Dutch side of the isle. On the French side of the isle, roads to the different sites are not accessible because of the severe damage. The network in that area is down.

Network connection to other isles

Unfortunately, the network that is located on the isle of Saba is also down and it is currently unknown how severe the problems are. According to Bert Schreuder, managing director at C3 Communications, it is currently impossible to contact our local engineer that is stationed in Saba. Luckily the network at St. Eustatius is up and running. C3 is constantly trying to get in touch with the local engineers in order to restore the entire network (covering the islands of the Dutch Caribbean), however it seems that this will take some more days as all inter island connections are down as well. 

According to Bert Schreuders: "First Responders in the area of Phillipsburg are now able to use the TETRA network. The only challenge is that petrol, that is necessarily to fuel the the diesel generators, might get short  or will be looted. In order to control the looting, we have made agreements with the police and fire brigade. Schreuders continued: "Our colleagues in St. Maarten are doing well and from our headquarters we are sending extra personnel, emergency communication equipment, food, water and other supplies to help Hurricane Irma victims. We still are waiting on clearance".

The C3 network was recently (this summer) upgraded by Rohill. The modernisation of the C3 TETRA network did exist of a replacement of hardware of base stations to the latest generation TETRA carriers, as well as a complete transition to TetraNode Industrial. Beside this, geo-redundancy of TETRA switches should have increased the network resilience, but only in case of a flooded switch location or lightning strike.