Storm Preparation

Many factors can impact your EAN LTE service. While we try to build our sites to be resilient to storms and other acts of nature, we cannot protect them from everything. Major storms and other acts of nature (wildfires, strong winds, lightning) can all cause damage to our sites that will force them to be offline. 

Due to the sometimes harsh nature of the Upper Peninsula and our equipment being mounted outside on remote tower sites, it's possible that you'll experience service outages in your area. We want you to know that we will do all that we can to restore service as quickly as we can to your location in the event of an outage. 

During an outage, employee safety is our top priority. As the storm clears and it is deemed safe, our crews will start the repair process. We cannot perform restorations on sites that are not deemed safe or in conditions that do not allow our crews to perform the tasks they need to do (i.e., tower climbing). 

Outage FAQs

1. What should I do if my EAN service goes out?
   
   If your service is not operational and you have power, please try our basic troubleshooting steps. 
   Once power has been restored, you may need to reboot (not reset) your LTE device and router to regain connection.
   We will also keep an updated article on the main page with information as it becomes available to us on the status of the outage. Please check our knowledge base for that information.
   
   
2. What is taking so long to restore my service?
   
   We start working on service restoration as soon as we are notified a site is down by our monitoring systems. In the best cases, it can take a few hours to get to the site, assess the problem, and implement the repair. In some cases, we need to climb a tower or order a replacement part.
   Restoring service is very important to us, but we may need to wait for the storm to clear or for the site to become safe for our crews to proceed with the repair. 
   
   
3. Why don't I see your crews working on my tower?
   
   Due to the nature of our LTE network, we may be working on a site a few miles away. In order to get backhaul to all of our locations, we utilize microwave backhauls to get into the remote sites. Because of this, the issue might be at the tower site that provides service to your site. This can be especially frustrating during power outages because the power at your home (and even your transmission site) is operational but it may be out at the site that feeds your transmission site, causing an outage at your location. We will do our best to communicate this with our users so they are aware of the issue.
   
   
4. Why does the power go out so often?
   
   Many of our locations are in areas that are serviced by an older part of the power grid. We install batteries and (where possible) generators to try to help prevent this but even batteries and generators can fail in some circumstances. When we have a power outage at a site, we reach out to the power company and try to obtain an ETA from them, but this isn't always possible as the power companies are working hard to resolve the issue and do not have an accurate timetable.