Resilient by design: Building and rebuilding connectivity in disaster-prone regions

Natural disasters are a persistent threat across many telecom markets, typhoons in the Philippines, earthquakes in Indonesia, floods in Bangladesh, wildfires in Australia. For telcos, resilience is no longer just about redundancy; it’s about designing networks, operations, and partnerships that can withstand and rapidly recover from extreme events. This session explores practical strategies to harden infrastructure, ensure business continuity, and restore services quickly when disaster strikes—while balancing costs, regulatory requirements, and community needs. We’ll showcase lessons learned from operators that have successfully navigated major outages and examine emerging technologies that can make networks “disaster-ready” from the outset. Key talking points 

• Integrating disaster modelling into network planning and AI-driven outage detection  

• Infrastructure hardening techniques and power resilience 

• Alignment with national disaster preparedness frameworks and leveraging USFs for resilience 

• Rapid recovery capabilities: COWs, satellite coverage and roaming agreements