Winds gusts of over 100 kilometers an hour wreaked havoc throughout the province on Jan. 15, leaving a trail of damage throughout the region.
Approximately 50 wireless MCSNet towers experienced damage, leaving residents across rural Alberta and Saskatchewan without Internet and home phone.
According to the MCSNet website there were outages in the following counties: Athabasca, Barrhead, Beaver, Bonnyville, Camrose, Lac La Biche, Smoky Lake, St. Paul, Strathcona, Thorhild, Two Hills, Wainwright and Westlock.
No one from MCSNet could be reached for a formal comment on the outages, however they were running an updated voice message on their hotline, which stated: “All staff have been focused completely on the task of restoring services to the effected areas and crews have been working seven days a week to repair the damaged towers.”
The company also put up a page on their website constantly updating the sites and towers that have been repaired.
Services in Cherry Grove, Beaverdam, Beaver Crossing, regions north of Mallaig, north of Glendon, Goodridge, Therien, Lessard, Crane Lake, Happy Hollow and north of Iron River were all restored on Jan. 16, 19, 20 and 24.
Towers in the Cold Lake region, including Cold Lake north, Horseshoe Bay, Riverhurst, Ethel Lake and whispering Spruce Estates were restored on Jan. 17.
According to MCSNet, as of Jan. 23, services to 60 per cent of the affected customers had been restored.
They also plan to credit customers for the time disconnected during the outage.
“Credits for down time are being automatically given to all effected customers and will continue to be applied until services have been restored.”
Other Internet service providers, including Telus and Eastlink, were not affected by the windstorm in the Lakeland region. Telus did report issues in the western portion of the province.
