Telecom Intelligence: Week of September 23, 2024 Hurricane Helene made landfall as a Category 4 and then did something the industry hadn't fully modeled: it drowned the mountains. Flooding across western North Carolina and Appalachia shredded fiber routes and cut power to cell sites far inland, leaving whole counties dark — the FCC's Saturday status report counted cell sites down by the hundreds across six states, with the worst still to come. In Washington, the FCC had a consequential week of its own: it adopted georouting for 988 crisis calls so mobile callers reach help near where they are, and finalized a $6 million fine for the AI-generated Biden robocall — its first major enforcement against generative-AI voice fraud on the phone network.