Telecommunications services play a key role during the tension caused by an earthquake like the one that occurred yesterday in Mexico.
As a result of the effects of the 7.7 magnitude earthquake in several parts of the country on the electric power supply, telecommunications services were affected in several areas, as reported by the main providers in the sector, América Móvil through its companies Telmex and Telcel, as well as AT&T.
América Móvil reported that Telcel and Telmex’s voice and internet telecommunications services were down but returned to normal. However, there was a saturation of the networks after the earthquake and shortly after.
Spokespersons for the group indicated that there were no reports of service failures, except in some areas where electricity flow was interrupted, but that, in terms of infrastructure, except for network congestion, voice, internet, Whatsapp, and messaging services, operated normally.
On the other hand, AT&T sources reported network congestion during the earthquake and shortly after this natural phenomenon, but no problems in its network.
After the earthquake, our network is operating normally. Some of our users may be perceiving possible congestion due to call retries, but we expect this to normalize,” AT&T said.
However, through social networks, users reported failures in different areas of Mexico City, so telecommunications providers’ sources stated that the problems were not due to failures in their networks.
With the gradual reestablishment of the electric flow, internet service was normalized after 1900 hours.
For its part, an analysis by The Competitive Intelligence Unit (The CIU) indicates that 37 years after the earthquake registered in 1985 and 5 years after the earthquake registered in 2017, the biggest difference is the technological tools that have been developed in the world and that, undoubtedly, a very important one is telecommunications.
In such context, he indicated that different telecommunications applications could be observed for each of these when dividing an earthquake into three phases.
One is prevention, for which applications issue alerts such as those used in the CDMX to warn of an earthquake. As it is the same system, the Smartphone starts to sound before the event happens. The number of seconds that elapse between the time the alert begins to sound and the tremor varies depending on the distance of the epicenter from Mexico City.
More than one million are without electricity.
The Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) informed that 1.3 million users were left without electricity due to the earthquake registered on September 19.
As of this morning, service had been restored to 95% of those affected, as it closely coordinated with the National Civil Protection System to accelerate these works.
According to information provided by the company, in the event of any emergency, some of the cuts are made automatically to avoid greater damages.
Yesterday, Monday, September 19, at 1:05 p.m., 1.3 million users in five states were without electricity service, representing 9% of the CFE’s customers.
The area most affected was Mexico City, with 572,663 users without electricity, representing 20% of the total; the State of Mexico, with 335,938; Colima, 202,597; Michoacán, with 121,943; and Jalisco, 72,555.
Regarding its effect on the National Electric System, the earthquake affected 2,645 megawatts of the load of the Central Regional Control Management. There was a loss of the National Transmission Network in the Central GCR 1 85 kV Transmission Line and in the Western GCR 4 Transmission Lines of 440 kilowatts, two of 230 kilowatts, two autotransformers of 400/230 kilowatts, and one of 230/115 kilowatts”.
During the earthquake, the generation of the Manzanillo complex was affected, but there was no significant damage to the main equipment.
The restoration work has been carried out under the best safety conditions for personnel and citizens,” said the CFE.
TYT Newsroom
