Chile’s transport and telecommunications minister Felipe Morandé has met with the country’s main telcos to set up a work group to develop technologies that will enable a faster response to problems experienced with telecoms networks following the recent earthquake and energy blackout, local daily La Nación reported.

The telcos included Movistar, Entel, Claro, Nextel, VTR and Telmex.

“We’re going to work with the main players in this industry to find the technical tools to ensure communications networks can properly respond to emergencies,” Morandé said.

The official announced the creation of two technical work groups: one for fixed line and one for mobile that will work over the next three weeks to help thrash out a regulatory framework for a course of action in such situations.

In a recent article published by El Mostrador, former head of telecoms regulator Subtel, Pablo Bello, underscored that by and large the country’s telecommunications networks did not suffer much structural damage. The problem was a spike in traffic that caused congestion.

He said that it is not practical to ask telcos to invest in latent capacity in order to cope with situations that happen maybe once in a lifetime.

“We don’t invest in 12-lane highways to cover the demand we see at New Year’s, but in the capacity needed for the majority of the time,” Bello said. “Congestion in the circumstances we saw is inevitable.”

Following the earthquake, it was difficult to get a real idea of the dimensions of the damage, especially in areas close to the epicenter due to a collapse in communications. A lack of concrete information led emergency authorities to not issue a tsunami warning, which had devastating consequences.

Bello suggested the need to establish a state entity that falls under the interior ministry and armed forces that operates an emergency communications network that is interoperable with other networks.

As regards the energy blackout, which was related to the earthquake, Bello said the country needs to seek alternative energy sources such as solar or wind power to charge batteries that are used for backup generators by mobile operators when energy lines are down.

Following the earthquake, the power blackout lasted for four days in some areas and batteries were not designed to last that long, especially at times of peak use of cell sites, according to information from the operators themselves.

Regarding the measures the government could take, “it might be a combination of measures which together could partly mitigate the effects as congestion is always going to occur at times like these,” Carlos Rodríguez, product and services manager for Entel, told BNamericas.

Actions being considered include limiting mobile talk time to a couple of minutes per user, encouraging use of texting instead of voice and using the mobile network to issue alerts.

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