Solar power won’t prevent Internet dropouts during load shedding

More and more South Africans with the means to do so are turning to alternative power sources – primarily solar power – to bypass loadshedding outages. But regardless of how many panels you put on your roof, even going completely ‘off grid’ won’t guarantee Internet connectivity to your home during loadshedding.

That’s the view of Paul Colmer, EXCO member at Wireless Access Provider’s Association (WAPA), who says that even if your home equipment has continuous power, your local fibre exchange might not.

“Just because you’re protected against loadshedding, be it with your own electricity generation through solar power, battery backup, or a backyard generator, that doesn’t mean you won’t lose your Internet connection when the lights go out for everyone else,” says Colmer.

“The simple reason for this is that your home fibre depends on the local fibre exchange having sufficient backup power for loadshedding outages, the higher levels of loadshedding we’ve been experiencing this year means batteries don’t have enough time to recharge between outages and are likely to fail at some point,” he says.

“What’s more, even if the power supply to your local fibre node is protected by enough backup batteries, that node connects back to an upstream provider that connects your service provider to the global Internet. When those direct links to the Internet are affected by blackouts, no amount of local battery backup or solar power is going to get the Internet to your home.”

There’s no easy way for fibre Internet customers to get around the problem. Even though they’re spending millions of rands each month to buy battery backup capacity, mobile Internet service providers are even less reliable than fibre, with their towers going down due to battery theft or lack of sufficient battery capacity, which is why you’ll find your mobile reception is often disrupted during blackouts.

And while fibre operators are optimistic that even stage 6 loadshedding won’t affect their services, the waters get murky when we hit higher stages. Analysts expect ‘at least 250 days of load shedding in 2023, predominantly at stage 4’, surpassing the South African Reserve Bank’s 200-day target at the start of the year, and some are already setting the scene for much higher stages to follow, especially as we approach the high demand winter months.

“Outside the metro areas, many local fibre operators still rely on the old Telkom exchanges for Internet connectivity, and these tend to suffer most from the lack of backup power during higher stages of load shedding,” says Colmer.

“Thankfully in South Africa we have an established network of Wireless Internet Service Providers (WISPs) working in rural and less populated areas, that have been delivering off-grid Internet services for several years now and are therefore impacted far less by the current malaise,” Colmer said