System Status and Restoration Plan for Hurricane Lee We’ve been watching this approaching hurricane very closely, and even though it may not make direct landfall near us, the wind field and rain will affect our southern serving area which includes parts of Aroostook and Washington counties. To ensure maximum availability of communications services, we have a number of employees standing by in the event of a major outage. What this means is, that if an outage occurs, these people will go to work restoring services in the following order: ● Primary internet uplinks ● Major data circuits for internal communication ● First responder internet access and telephone ● Essential business services ● Residential services en masse; meaning service to a neighborhood or node but not necessarily individual households. Pioneer has three stateside upstream Internet service providers to the south through Greater Portland, and one Internet service provider to the east through Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada. It is our intention to maintain all of them, but we would be able to continue fairly normal operation with only one. Our voice provider maintains switches in Bangor and Portland. We are directly peered with that voice provider via a fiber connection in the Presque Isle, Maine Consolidated Communications central office. Please remember: do not touch downed lines. You do not know if they may be energized. Some communications lines contain metallic internal components for either transmitting or locating and they can become conductive. Please look at the Maine Emergency Management Association website or Facebook page for more information on how to prepare for the hurricane. Be Safe. Pioneer Broadband