Winter storms pose challenges for our network teams – see pics!

Winter arrived with a vengeance in early July. Herotel owns and operates the biggest wireless network in South Africa and the 3^rd biggest fibre network. One of the challenges we face operating our wireless networks in particular, is that our equipment has to be located in some fairly hostile environments to ensure that we have line-of-site to our customers. When the weather turns ugly, our equipment is at the mercy of mother nature and getting our teams out to repair it and restore our services poses some unique challenges.

In early July the first winter storms barreled into the Western Cape with 8-meter-high waves, 90km/h winds, torrential rains and snow. Eskom power supply was damaged, some of our masts were blown over and widespread flooding made gaining access to our equipment extremely challenging. Some of our high sites were completely inaccessible by our fleet of 4WD bakkies, and our teams had to resort to trekking long distances through knee-deep mud, ice and snow to get to our equipment. And when that failed, we resorted to hiring a helicopter!

Almost 100 fibre and wireless locations required attention and our teams on the ground worked around the clock for 2 weeks to get everything back up and running. We’re extremely grateful to all our affected customers for their patience and understanding during this time.