Latvia’s Ministry of Transport, together with mobile operators, is working on a plan to ensure that communications remain operational for at least 72 hours during a crisis, the ministry’s Parliamentary Secretary Jānis Upenieks told the Saeima Economic, Agricultural, Environmental and Regional Policy Committee on Tuesday.
Jurijs Sadovskis, Director of the Ministry of Transport’s Communications Department, said the ministry’s objective is to maintain a minimum level of mobile electronic communications services during a crisis. This includes the ability to make emergency calls to 112, access to voice calls and text messaging, receiving cell broadcast alerts from the national early warning system, as well as maintaining a minimum level of data transmission to the extent permitted by the network’s technical capacity.
Speaking about the challenges, Sadovskis noted that an emergency call to 112 can be made as long as at least one mobile network remains operational. Receiving cell broadcast alerts requires both a functioning mobile network and a device that supports the relevant functionality.
Maintaining a minimum level of service should therefore be understood as keeping priority network elements operational rather than restoring each individual service separately.
Commenting on the impact of the recent storm on communications, Sadovskis said that,
according to the initial assessment, 20–30% of network nodes were unavailable.
Mobile operators restored 80% of their network capacity within the first 24 hours.
Upenieks said the Ministry of Transport sees amendments to the Electronic Communications Law as one potential solution. The amendments, which are due to be considered by the Cabinet on Tuesday, would allow roaming to be provided during crisis situations.
At the same time, Upenieks said the ministry and mobile operators are working on a plan and have established requirements for 72-hour resilience. A strategy is being developed to determine which towers should remain operational in order to maintain network coverage for at least 72 hours.
He explained that the objective is not for every operator to install a generator at every mobile tower. Although theoretically possible, such an approach would require significant resources during a crisis to supply the generators with fuel and keep them operating.
Instead,
mobile operators and the Ministry of Transport are developing a plan
to provide the widest possible communications coverage using as few generators as possible, while also making use of roaming services during a crisis.
Upenieks stressed that many proposals and ideas have emerged following the storm and are currently being compiled and discussed by a working group involving mobile operators. One example is the potential use of Starlink services.
Sadovskis also said mobile operators, the Latvian State Radio and Television Centre (LVRTC) and Tet have called for the development of a common platform-based information exchange tool. Such a system would make it possible to manage crisis situations more effectively and identify where resources need to be directed in order to restore communications coverage more quickly and efficiently.
The Ministry of Transport and the Saeima committee agreed that the ministry would provide an update in the second week of October,
including an assessment of capacity related to underground fibre-optic network infrastructure.
As previously reported, Latvia was hit on the 22nd of August and the following night by its strongest summer storm in decades, with wind speeds exceeding 30 metres per second in some areas.
The storm caused widespread damage to both distribution and transmission electricity networks. At the peak of the storm, 285,000 customers were simultaneously without electricity. In many areas, power outages were followed by disruptions to communications, petrol stations and, in some places, shops.
Transport Minister Rihards Kozlovskis (JV) subsequently instructed mobile operators, in cooperation with LVRTC, Tet and the Ministry of Transport, to prepare an action plan to strengthen the resilience of the communications sector during emergencies.
The plan is intended to improve mobile coverage during crises and ensure that communications can be restored quickly.
The minister has also stressed the importance of strengthening the capacity of the Crisis Management Centre
and its ability to coordinate cooperation between different services and institutions during emergencies.
One of the solutions under consideration is national roaming during emergencies. This would allow customers of one mobile operator to use another operator’s network if their own provider’s network is unavailable in a particular area.
However, the Ministry of Transport has stressed that national roaming cannot replace investment in the physical resilience of communications infrastructure. If a power outage disables the base stations of all operators, there is no functioning network to which customers can switch.
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