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Reserve Your Seat TodaySiskiyou Telephone, a family-run telecom provider in Western Siskiyou County, needed a practical way to monitor remote cabinets, fiber runs, and critical network equipment across rugged terrain. They deployed DPS Telecom's T/Mon platform to centralize alarms and deliver on-call notifications, helping technicians respond faster and avoid unnecessary trips to hard-to-reach sites.
| Industry | Telecommunications |
|---|---|
| Company | Siskiyou Telephone (family-run business serving Western Siskiyou County for over 125 years) |
| Coverage | Western Siskiyou County, Northern California (7 telephone exchanges) |
| Primary Challenge | Maintaining uptime and speeding fault response across remote cabinets and long fiber runs exposed to rugged terrain, winter access constraints, wildlife, and wildfire impacts |
| Solution Deployed | T/Mon alarm monitoring with text-message notifications, after-hours alerting, and alarm escalation when events are not acknowledged |
| Key Result | Improved visibility into site and equipment status (including switches, batteries, and connectivity), enabling faster dispatch decisions and fewer unnecessary site visits |
| Products Used | T/Mon platform |
Siskiyou Telephone is a family-run business that has served Western Siskiyou County for over 125 years. They operate seven telephone exchanges in the county and also offer internet packages and long distance calling plans.
August and Henry Dannenbrink founded the Siskiyou Telephone Company in 1896 after their father immigrated to Weaverville, CA from Hanover, Germany. The company remains in the Dannenbrink family line well over a century later.
Albert Elam is a CO Tech for Siskiyou Telephone. His responsibilities include CO work, serving as a backup installer, and monitoring network health from the main office.
Mike Lytken is Siskiyou Telephone's Microwave Technician. His job often involves mountaintop site visits and work on generator-backed infrastructure.
Siskiyou Telephone supports cabinets and fiber runs with up to 8 miles between them. Many assets are on hillsides and in rugged terrain, making it difficult to locate and access sites when faults occur.
As Mike Lytken explained, "It's time-consuming, from where our central offices are. It's an hour and a half to two hours just to get to the site and then begin to troubleshoot from there."
Winter conditions increase the challenge further, with snowed-in sites and buried fiber runs. "It can be all day. It depends on how much snow you have to push," Albert Elam added.
On top of access constraints, the region also presents physical threats to outside plant and remote infrastructure. Siskiyou Telephone has dealt with outages associated with wildlife damage and with wildfire impacts that can force temporary cabling and change the risk profile of the network.
To reduce guesswork and help the team prioritize dispatches, Siskiyou Telephone uses DPS Telecom's T/Mon platform to consolidate alarm and status information in one interface. This provides a single operational view of site health and equipment state, so technicians can decide quickly when a truck roll is required and when it is not.
When a fiber fault occurs, alarms from a T/Mon monitoring device alert the team so technicians can respond with the right tools, including a handheld OTDR to find and repair the fault. Siskiyou Telephone also uses T/Mon for after-hours notification, including text-message-based notifications. If an alarm is not acknowledged after 15 minutes, T/Mon is configured to escalate the event to a text message during daytime working hours.
"The T/Mon lets us know when a certain site is down," -Albert Elam, Siskiyou Telephone
For telecom operators with similar challenges, DPS Telecom typically recommends pairing T/Mon alarm management with field I/O and SNMP data collection so alarms can cover both facility infrastructure and IP-connected devices. In many deployments, a DPS Telecom NetGuardian RTU is used at remote sites to bring in discrete inputs (door, generator, and power alarms), analog values (battery and temperature), and SNMP traps - then T/Mon correlates and routes notifications. (This is a common pattern for remote cabinet monitoring; the client-specific solution described in this story is T/Mon.)
The catastrophic McKinney wildfire started in July of this year and was fully contained in the beginning of October. The fire burned an area of over 60,000 acres in the Klamath River area. While recent rain and snowfall have all but put out what remains of the fire by now, the event did cause some outages for Siskiyou Telephone.
The fire damaged Siskiyou Telephone's equipment to the point that they have since laid temporary ground cables. These temporary cables are even more susceptible to faults than aerial or buried fiber runs, making reliable monitoring even more critical during active fire conditions.
As Albert Elam explained, "Well, if we lose connection to a certain site, the T/Mon lets us know when a certain site is down." He also noted they receive a range of alarms from network and power-related sources: "We get a lot of alarms out of our C15 switches, low battery alarms, ping fail alarms, the whole network, really. Everything's alarm-based."
By using T/Mon as an operational alarm hub, Siskiyou Telephone maintained the ability to detect issues quickly and coordinate the right response during wildfire season, when travel, access, and infrastructure conditions can change rapidly.
In the remote wooded region of Northern California, Siskiyou County is home to plenty of wild animals. Siskiyou Telephone has experienced cases where wildlife interfered with outside plant, resulting in outages that required targeted troubleshooting in difficult terrain.
Albert Elam described a field response where the team discovered damage to a cable that appeared to come from a surprising culprit: bears. "They started trekking around the hillside, and they ended up finding bear chew marks," he said. After repairing one broken fiber strand, they realized the underlying issue was worse than expected.
Mike Lytken added, "We found this pretty severe chew spot, and thought we were heroes and saving the day and put it back together... there was one broken fiber strand in there."
The real problem turned out not to be the bear chewing, but a fallen telephone pole. As Elam explained, "The pole had been so damaged by woodpeckers," compromising its integrity until it split. "It bent our risers and kinked the main fiber. That's why it actually went down..."
For networks with long spans between cabinets and limited access roads, this is exactly the type of failure mode where centralized alarming is useful: T/Mon helps confirm that a site is down, supports rapid triage, and enables dispatch with the correct tools and a prioritized plan.
"I like the GFX part of it, putting a map on there." -Albert Elam
Siskiyou Telephone plans to use additional T/Mon features to improve the operator experience and preserve troubleshooting knowledge. Mike Lytken described plans to put the trouble logs feature to use moving forward: "To put the updated notes in there as to what it took to repair a site, or just even adding pictures and things to that nature, that would be super helpful for the next guy."
In practice, recording notes against an alarm point can help standardize response: operators can see what changed, what was tried, and what ultimately resolved the issue, which improves consistency for future dispatches.
Another planned capability is the geographic map display in T/Mon GFX, which provides a visual view of where alarms occur. Elam noted, "Cause I like visual, and right now it's just the text display." By adding mapping and graphics, Siskiyou Telephone expects to reduce time spent translating text-only alarms into physical locations, helping dispatchers and technicians get to the right area faster.
Learn more about how T/Mon GFX supports faster alarm response with location-based visualization.
T/Mon platform - Centralizes alarms for network and facility monitoring, supports notification routing and escalation, and enables options like GFX mapping and trouble logs.
T/Mon is used to centralize alarms from many sources, including switch and router events, connectivity status (such as ping failures), power system alarms, and site conditions. It provides one place for operators to view, acknowledge, and route alarms.
Texting can notify on-call staff immediately after hours. Escalation rules help ensure alarms are seen and acted on if they are not acknowledged within a defined time window, improving response consistency.
When a site is hours away or inaccessible during snow or severe weather, operators need accurate remote visibility to decide whether to dispatch, what tools to bring, and where to start troubleshooting.
GFX adds a visual layer, allowing teams to see alarms on a geographic map or site diagram. This helps translate an alarm into a physical location quickly, which can save time during outages.
Many telecom operators use T/Mon for alarm management and pair it with RTUs at the edge to collect discrete and analog signals (power, battery, doors, generator status) and IP alarms (SNMP). DPS Telecom offers both alarm management and RTU options to support these architectures.
Siskiyou Telephone has trusted DPS Telecom to provide the gear to monitor their assets through routine and extraordinary threats. If you need to improve visibility into remote cabinets, fiber routes, power systems, or IP equipment, DPS Telecom can help you design a monitoring approach built around T/Mon and the right field interfaces for your sites.
Get a Free Consultation or call DPS Telecom at 1-800-693-0351 to speak with an expert about your project.
Haley Zeigler
Haley is a Technical Marketing Writer at DPS Telecom. She works closely alongside the Sales and Marketing teams, as well as DPS engineers, resulting in a broad understanding of DPS products, clients, and the network monitoring industry.
