Theft of generators hampers work to restore communications to Gisborne and Hawke’s Bay

Phone companies restoring cellphone coverage in Gisborne and Hawke’s Bay have been hampered by thieves stealing generators deployed to keep cell towers running.

After power went down in the region during Cyclone Gabrielle, telecommunications companies resorted to powering their cell towers with generators.

Paul Brislen, chief executive of the NZ Telecommunications Forum, said: “We’ve got generators all over the place, which means the occasional outage when generators are dry, or when some fellow steals them, which is not uncommon.

“In Gisborne and Napier we lost three or four generators overnight,” he said.

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The stolen generators had GPS tracking, so thieves could expect a visit from police, he said.

Spark, Chorus, Vodafone, and 2degrees, the forum’s members, were well on the way to restoring most services in most parts of Northland and Coromandel, Brislen said.

Most cell sites in those regions were operating now, with only a few sites out of action, he said.

There were still some pockets of Northland without operating cell towers, because there were not enough generators available.

In Gisborne and Hawke’s Bay, major temporary repair operations were under way, including laying 3km of fibre by helicopter along a ridge in Tolaga Bay, Brislen said.

“The storm did major damage to Chorus’ fibre network in the area,” he said. “They have been busy repairing the fibre that has been damaged.”

Once the 3km fibre temporary repair was completed, bandwidth into and out of the region would dramatically increase, Brislen said.

Currently, cellphone coverage for many in Gisborne and Hawkes Bay was restricted to voice and text, Brislen said.

“That means no eftpos, no Netflix, no surfing the internet, no checking your emails,” Brislen said.

“Once we have bandwidth back on with the fibre, we can crank that back up to normal levels, and then the only problem is still power supply.”

Work to assess a 50km break in Chorus’ fibre connections south of Gisborne was under way, Brislen said.

The forum hoped the temporary repairs in the region would be completed this weekend, but the telco companies needed power back on to their cell towers.

“At the moment we have got trucks running around the Hawke’s Bay topping up generators, that’s not very sustainable,” he said.

2degrees said after deploying generators it now had 40 sites out of service, largely in the Gisborne and Hawke’s Bay region, down from a peak of 160 three days ago.

In Gisborne, 2degrees said its 4G coverage had been restored via a satellite-fed small cell in Gisborne central, but it was reliant upon Chorus’ repairs to restore full service in the city.

Spark said it had restored an additional 18 cell towers in the last 24 hours, including another four in Northland, four in Hawke’s Bay, and two in Gisborne.

“We have Te Puia Springs live, and expect to have basic connectivity (calls and texts) up and running in Wairoa imminently,” the company said.

“We currently have more generators moving up the East Cape, and should have Tolaga Bay and north up to Hicks Bay restored at some stage today (Friday).”

“Full services to Gisborne, including internet access, will take longer to restore due to the challenging fibre cuts, but our teams are continuing to work with our partners on other options, and we expect to see more services return tomorrow,” Spark said.

Vodafone now has just 57 mobile sites without connectivity because of power or fibre outages. It had 73 generators in action.

“The majority of Gisborne now has cell coverage and four cell sites north of Gisborne have been restored,” Vodafone said.

Tolaga Bay should be reconnected on Friday, Vodafone said. Many rural connectivity sites remained down.