Second fiber optic line in the works

A second connection between Carson Valley and the rest of the world is in the planning stage.

A spokeswoman for Frontier Communications said the company is planning to build a redundant line within the next 18 months.

Communications Manager Stephanie Beasly said that after Frontier acquired Verizon Telephone's local wireline in Carson Valley they've been building a plan for an additional fiber optic line into the Valley.

"If the line should be cut, traffic will automatically reroute on the other line out of the Valley," she said. "We're doing everything we can to prevent outages."

Beasly said 27,000 of Frontier's nearly 35,000 customers in Douglas, Alpine, Lyon and Mono counties were knocked out when contractors building the Carson-Minden pipeline severed the fiber optic cable along Heybourne Road on Dec. 8.

"The construction company had the lines exposed, but still cut it," Beasly said. "What seems like a small cable impacts a large population of customers."

The cable break disrupted the county's 911 system, phone, and cellular service.

"Most local carriers carry the cellular from wireless towers to the rest of the world," she said. "It did impact a lot of services. A small fiber line can carry so many vital services, important to be very cautious when working around fiber cables."

Fiber optic cable is difficult to splice, Beasly said, but as soon as technicians arrived on the scene they were able to splice the cable and get most customers back on line within a few hours.

In the meantime local exchanges in the Valley could communicate. Some services, such as Charter phone and Internet, continued to operate through the outage.