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Early this morning, Humboldt County’s newest internet service provider — Vero Fiber — finally managed to put its Eureka customers back on line, after a 36-hour outage caused by a fire near Laytonville that took out the main fiber-optic cable between here and the Bay Area. 

This afternoon, the Outpost was able to get in touch with Evan Biagi, Vero’s chief revenue officer, to talk about what went wrong and what it plans to do about it. 

First of all, Biagi wished to assure Humboldt County that the company had taken the outage very seriously. He said that Vero management had been receiving texts every hour updating them on progress toward a fix.

“We’re holding ourselves to a higher standard, here,” he said. “It’s just not acceptable to have outages like this in our world.”

So what went wrong? According to Biagi, it wasn’t that Vero had consciously put all its eggs in that one fiber-optic cable through Laytonville.

Biaggi told the Outpost that the company was very aware of the problems Humboldt County has experienced in the past, back when there was only one fiber-optic line connecting it with the wider word. Vero had implemented redundancy to prevent these issues before it ever started hooking up homes in Eureka, Biagi said. It found out, when the fire hit, that this redundancy did not work as expected.

So the first thing that the company will be addressing is making sure that they nail down a redundancy plan that does work if the north-south line is severed again.

“We’re now in the mode where we’re expecting this to happen again, and how do we make sure our network stays up when that occurs?” he said. “We want to build the most robust network possible, so a single incident doesn’t impede internet services.”

Biagi assured the Outpost that such will be the case even after Vero lights up its own big fiber-optic line to Humboldt — the Digital 299 project, which runs along the highway to Shasta County. Biagi assured the Outpost that even when that project is fully operational, the company will maintain redundancy options with the other main cables out of town.

Vero customers should soon be receiving an email that will further apologize and atone for the trouble the outage has caused. But all in all, Biagi said, Humboldt seems to be cutting his company some slack through all of this, and he said that this has been noticed and is very much appreciated.

“We’ve been following a lot of chatter out there, and the lack of negativity on public forums has been great,” he said. “I think that speaks to the community there.”

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UPDATE, 2:36 p.m.: The email to customers went out shortly after this story was published. In it, Vero credited all its Humboldt County customers with one free month of service and pledged $5,000 apiece to the the Laytonville Volunteer Fire Department and Food for People.