The American Samoa Telecommunications Authority is apologizing to customers who were affected by an outage of the 699 phone exchange Wednesday which had some spill over into 688, 655 an 677 numbers.
Some customers experienced two outages yesterday; one at 9:33 am lasted 50 minutes and the second at 12:08 pm lasted for 70 minutes.
ASTCA CEO Lewis Wolman explained that the outage was due to failures of a fiber link on a segment of their network that flows through the Communications Office in Ili’ili.
He said, “Fiber links go down on occasion, and that is why the ASTCA network has been gradually redesigned (at great expense) the past few years to have automatic rerouting when a segment fails.
“This is also why ASTCA has been gradually putting into place diagnostic tools that help us quickly identify the source of network disturbances.”
Wolman pointed out that the outage in Iliili yesterday was similar to the fiber link failure in Fagatogo about six months ago.
After that outage ASTCA was able to modify the network to put Fagatogo on a auto-rerouting configuration.
The ASTCA CEO said it took more than a month to modify the Fagatogo network due to major engineering challenges.
ASTCA has already begun the project to “fix” the lack of self-mending related to Ili’ili.
“Unlike Fagatogo, which was a major engineering challenge, we think that fixing the problem in Ili’ili is something that can be accomplished within a week,” said Wolman.
“But we won’t know for sure until more tests are completed in the coming days.”
