The outage lasted a week, with communications resuming on Wednesday, May 22nd at about 10am Saipan time.
After communications resumed, I received the following (somewhat edited) update from Gordon Walker, who is our PacIOOS contact and manages the Docomo account that provides cellular service to this station in Saipan:
I was able to speak with [a Docomo representative] from the Guam office. Calls to Docomo, Saipan that are not answered by a certain number of rings are routed to Guam. [He] was able to get their tech folks to "purge" the line. They asked if we could do a hard reset. After explaining our situation a few times, he finally understood that getting to the modem in Lao Lao bay is a difficult task.So it seems in this case that Docomo was prodded into action that directly resulted in the resumption of communications with the station. This is potentially bad news for Gordon and Docomo, since it means they must be alert to future outages and take manual correction action, but good news for the station and the DEQ/CRM folks, since it means that communications can sometimes be restored without the need for going out to the station and climbing it to power-cycle the modem.
Mike J+