GIFF JOHNSON
Having lived here for a very long time — since before anyone ever heard the name National Telecommunication Authority — I thought I’d pretty much heard it all when it comes to phone and internet disruptions.
Take your pick: Power outages, salt corroded copper phone lines, trucks and bulldozers driving over underground junction boxes, another utility digging and inadvertently breaking NTA’s underground cables. Any or all of the above happen from time to time.
This past week, however, we discovered a new and, as far as we know, novel reason that internet service was cut off.
The Journal, Flame Tree and other offices in the compound lost internet service during last week Monday’s storm-caused all-day downtown power outage. Tuesday arrived and no internet. The NTA team got right on it and discovered that the problem was located in a junction box underground between Flame and Formosa. The cover to the access box had been damaged, causing problems with the cables. Ergo: No internet for multiple offices.
It took a couple of days to get this solved, rewiring and rerouting cables, and replacing the damaged cover. Internet was on and off as they repaired it. Another internet outage Friday for the Journal led to further repairs by the NTA team.
Then Saturday morning, we discovered on arrival: Once again, no internet. We reported it and NTA jumped right on it.
And Saturday’s internet outage definitely qualifies under the heading: “You know you live in the Marshall Islands if his happens.”
All customers using the junction box between Flame and Formosa were affected by Saturday’s outage. What could have caused it after all the work NTA put into the repairs Tuesday through Friday?
NTA IT guys were back in checking the system when they discovered a hermit crab attempting to crawl out of the main two-inch cable conduit. The crab wandering around inside the conduit “appeared to be contributing to repeated disturbances of the fiber connections,” NTA reported to us. The small hermit crab was extricated, the conduit was blocked off, and internet has worked since.
So there you have it: The high-tech world of fiber cable communications brought to a standstill in Majuro by the intervention of one very analog hermit crab.