A helicopter lays fibre-optic cable inland from Gisborne after Cyclone Gabrielle. Photo: Chorus / Supplied
Telecommunications companies say it's still a "very fragile" situation for them in Hawke's Bay and Tai Rāwhiti.
They are relying on some temporary fixes, including fibre-optic cable laid directly on land and trees, to keep internet and phones going following Cyclone Gabrielle.
Telecommunications Forum chief executive Paul Brislen said top managers were nutting out the long-term fixes.
"From a network design point of view, is there another way of getting fibre across rivers, so we can avoid the damage that we saw from all the [forestry] slash coming down, taking out bridges and knocking out the fibre?" he asked.
"Do we instead put them on pylons?"
Telco chief technology officers met late last week to discuss this and many other options to rebuild with more resilience, following Telecommunications Emergency Forum meetings shortly after Gabrielle to address critical fixes.
The big-picture report is due to go to the government around the end of May.
The government two weeks ago said it expected to have information on the infrastructure recovery by the end of April.
"We expect to have the preliminary information soon and will share it when we do," a spokesperson said on Thursday.
All the dozen or so fibre cables into the regions were cut in the storm. All have been fixed, often by splicing in a new bit where the cable has broken at a bridge crossing.
"It is still a very fragile situation," Brislen said.
Another band-aid fix in one case was at a ridge, where the land was washed away and took out three kilometres of cable.
"We flew a helicopter very slowly over [it], laying fibre-optic cable across the treetops and connected it up at either end," Brislen said.
The armoured cable the thickness of a thumb was not attached to the trees.
"It's just lying on top of them. They were using a drone to carry cable over rivers, so that they could then... catch it on the other side."
This type of temporary reconnection was used after the 2016 Kaikōura earthquake, and in other countries.
Permanent fixes depend on complex coordination to build back other vital services that were cut.
"We've got to work with roading, for example, to make sure that we're not putting stuff down where they're about to put the new road," Brislen said.
It might appear to be slow-going, but was not, he added.
"One thing we don't want to do is rush. We have to reset the bar. We have to say okay, we had nine or 10 cables in and out of the region, they were all cut.
"That means 10 is no longer acceptable to a minimum, which is remarkable. A few years ago, we were talking about two or three cables in and out of that region would have been fine."
Cellphone towers were all back up, but they relied on fibre for connectivity.
The country had good infrastructure for normal times but "we don't have a lot of depth in terms of resilience, because it's so expensive, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars on each network".
