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Storm Causes AT&T Outage Across Midwest
dstates writes "AT&T left users across several Midwestern states without cellular phone service yesterday. The outage apparently resulted from a power failure at a Michigan switching center and spread to affect level3 Internet communications. The powerful windstorm also left 400,000 users without electricity. Interestingly, except for a few reports in Chicago and Indianapolis papers, AT&T has managed to keep this out of the mainstream media. Widespread communication failures also followed Hurricane Ike in Texas earlier this year. With the increasing trend for users to drop landlines and rely only on cell phones, this is becoming an emergency preparedness issue." Yes this included me. Still does. At least my office still has power — maybe we'll just camp here tonight. :)
The problem isn't the cell phone network per-se, but rather the inability of these providers to peer with each other. AT&T may have been down, but what about T-Mobile, the other GSM provider in the United States? When a major failure like this occurs that locks out only some cell phone users in a given area, the problem is not technology but politics.
Why, given how critical cell phones are during an emergency, this is allowed to continue is beyond me. Congress seems to care more about protecting corporate profits and reputation than providing a robust cellular network for its citizens. Hey, homeland security, are you listening? Fix this.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Interestingly, except for a few reports in Chicago and Indianapolis papers, AT&T has managed to keep this out of the mainstream media/
Conspiracy theory much? Maybe the media is more interested in reporting loss of life and emergency services than cell phone outage?
Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
then you're out of luck. Most landline phones have independent power and will work in an emergency. That's one reason I always have a landline.
I would argue that the OP has a point. I am a doctor, was on call (I'm not kidding), and missed several important messages due to my cellphone going out (my blackberry just silently stopped receiving all work mail, all internet functions went dead, full 3G signal but "tunnel failed.") Granted, there is a lot of redundancy in communications, so my pager later started going off with a lot of people saying "where are you???", and I then called them on a landline.
I thought it was my phone, rebooted 3 times, and only today did I find out that it was a national outage (saw here, confirmed all over the net.) I think AT&T should just have sent a free txt saying "We are having problems" or made an large scale announcement via voicemail, which would have helped me (and others) plan. I was about to get a replacement phone from a friend and plug my SIM into it.
The point is we start to rely on these devices, and blackberries, for better or worse, are used for very important things in business, health care, and otherwise.
Slashdotter, ID #101. UIDs are in binary, right?
I live in Indiana and the ATT&T trucks have been out in force.
Mostly just sitting in their vans, next to switching stations, drinking coffee and eating doughnuts. Now it makes sense.
Hurricane Island Outward Bound
OB
Comcast had impaired connectivity yesterday with traceroutes dieing in the L3 network.
Camping at the office is a time-honored tradition here in Minnesota, and now that the offices have internet access it's WAY more fun! ;)
"Christ what a design! I could eat a handful of iron filings and PUKE a better emergency pump than that!"
First Question of any contract: Any contract in which any of the party is unable to fulfill the terms of the contract will be is liable to either NOT collect remuneration of the said contract for that quantity, OR reimburse the amount for that period.
Will AT&T send me a check for the days my service was out?
Because last i checked, weather is not a cause for NOT fulfilling a contract. For the same reason i cannot claim weather for not paying my mortgage.
Question is, will AT&T refund the amount for the period of outage.
If not a class-action suit can be filed in coordination with other users.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
If you think today was fun, wait until April 2009 when the unions go on strike against AT&T. The company believes it can weather the strike by training salespeople and programmers to climb poles, but c'mon, we all know how well that will work out.
I was going to notify the press, but I couldn't get any calls on my cell phone to go through.
If AT&T's service was down, how would they send you a text or voicemail?
Most contracts include a "Force Majure" clause that absolves the service provider in the event of a natural disaster.
Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
i just called them and while they won't say they had an issue, they gave me a $10 credit
I knew somebody would claim this impossible, but both SMS and voicemail were working, at least in my area. Incoming calls seemed to go to VM and then I could retrieve it (I was driving, so might have been simply out of range). Outgoing calls worked for me. All 3G internet / WAP was down.
This morning service is back to normal, and there was no announcement SMS nor notification of recent downed services from AT&T, therefore, before I knew about all this I was still aiming to replace my phone. Hence my comment.
Slashdotter, ID #101. UIDs are in binary, right?
Brighthouse had some failure a couple weeks back and cable tv service was out for 8 to 20 hours depending on where you lived. Happened right when two big sports games were on tv so a lot of people were pissed. Brighthouse is doing pro-rated refunds for that time period. They also sent a coupon for a free pay per view movie and a letter of apology. A coupon for a free pay per view event, wrestling, boxing, whatever, would have been much nicer as I've already seen all of the pay per movies that I want to see right now. I thought it was a nice gesture though.
How is it that one careless match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box to start a campfire?
The inability for AT&T's datacenter in Michigan to have power backups that can last more than a day should hardly be considered a natural disaster.
I'd love to see something happen in terms of getting money back, but somehow I doubt most subscribers care enough to push for it.
They are major advertisers and can pretty much control what is reported about them most of the time. All they had to do was make a few calls... oh wait...
AT&T has managed to keep this out of the mainstream media
I'm in Arizona, and I saw that AT&T service was down in the midwest from multiple sources, before I finished my first cup of coffee. If there's been any lack of information reported about this, my guess is that's because the press is more concerned about hundreds of thousands who are without power in below freezing conditions, rather than a few people who can't make phone calls.
Natural disasters seem to be all the rage lately.
A few weeks ago, the U.S. Northeast was hit by a major ice storm. At the peak, ~1.4 million people were without power across Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, and upstate New York. FEMA declared emergencies in several areas, and each state declared emergencies and disaster areas in additional areas. Like a lot of people, I lost power for several days, which means I also lost heat and water (not on municipal water or on piped gas). This guy had the presence of mind to take a few pictures of the ice layers... it was kind of astonishing, at least to me.
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The summary is full of *very* misplaced expectations regarding wireless service.
A. There was never an expectation that the service would ever be plain old telephone service (POTS) quality. Thinking otherwise just sets you up for disappointment. Telco's pretty much hate POTS because it was designed and regulated to be extremely reliable. Get a POTS line and move on.
B. ATT doesn't care if individuals go without service. A few hundred thousand users having downtime for hours is nothing because it can be blamed on an "act of God." They care if they have to go before their regulators because that costs campaign contributions.
C. I have a bank of dial-up modems as the very last line of defense in our NOC for just this reason. We deal with messages, so it would work in a bad situation. Not ideal, but I'll take it and our customer's PHB's are generally pleased we think that carefully.
POTS is good. Long live POTS.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
This was even the case in Pittsburgh. I could not receive/make calls nor obtain any server communications over 3G despite the phone indicating full strength signal. Rebooting did not resolve the issue.
Via companies whose towers aren't down? Yeah it would cost them money, but it's the responsible thing to do.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
...to *NEVER* admit anything is wrong with their equipment. To do so is grounds for immediate termination.
WPS and GETS did not work from my cellular phone during this time. This was quite a severe outage, and caused 'No Service' for a very wide area locally as well. I did not determine if it was due to the tower being without power though, most sites have 8-12 hours of standby power at most.
If the facility had the roof blown off due to the 60mph+ winds we had, and caused a safety hazard due to exposed wiring, etc.. I certainly can see a case, but this is all conjecture. Unless you (and I don't) have facts to support your postulation, we can go on feeding the echo chamber more and more!
90 day profit margins have run the USA for the past 8 years - so the Minneapolis I-35 bridge collapses, New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are totaled and now we are looking at primary communications breaking down.
For more than 50 years telephone carried its own power. If your power line went down odds were that you still could call for an ambulance/fire over your telephone.
Today - we still have the weasels who claim that they are making the "homeland" safe against terrorists - but not storms!
We need infrastructure - maintenance and new far, far more now than we ever have in the past. We don't have local radio now - all programming is run by conglomerates. If that rail car in Fargo derails and leaks methylisocyanate - there is no way to warn the locals.....
Bophal comes to the US. Thanks a lot, BUSHCO!
This is currently happening in Columbus, OH. Calls go straight to VM. Voicemail and 3G are fine, working, and outbound calls are OK, but all incoming calls are hitting a "0 seconds" ringtime. They've 'reset' that to 20 seconds or longer, but it doesn't seem to make a difference...everything inbound goes to voicemail.
I experienced this yesterday driving west across the state on I-94--I kept getting "network busy" around Ann Arbor.
No statement is true, not even this one.
When my AT&T line goes down (which it does far too often given that the lines are underground) I get a credit on my next bill for the time form my trouble call until service is restored. Don't they do the same thing for cell phones? [Asked as a long-time Sprint customer. I don't know Sprint's policy -- on the other hand they've never been down [that I knew of anyway]]
Welcome to Canada - we see that all the time in Montreal; it's actually quite beautiful, until it gets heavy enough to snap trees, down powerlines, make sidewalks and roads unnavigable.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Our obligations to render services hereunder, in whole or in part, shall be suspended during any period where such rendering by us is prevented by in each case, any of the following factors which are beyond our reasonable control: war, riot, invasion, flood, fire, hurricane, tornado, requirement of law, computer virus, Internet infrastructure failure, disruption of services provided by our ISP or other suppliers, earthquake, computer system malfunction caused by factors not subject to our reasonable control, power failure, accident, strike or lockout, governmental interference or regulation, terrorism, infectious disease, or any other condition beyond our reasonable control. An equitable reduction in the fees to be paid to us shall be made in proportion to the value of any services required hereunder which we fail to provide due the existence of any such Force Majeure condition.
Standard boilerplate stuff. We had to invoke the clause a few years ago when a hurricane shut down our facilities for 2 days.
Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
.. if "the company" didn't pay them, they wouldn't get out of bed. Lets not pretend they're up those poles out of the kindness of their hearts.
Given that practically the entire state of Michigan is an economic disaster area with critical infrastructures (roads, utilities, state and local govts themselves, etc) crumbing apart for the past decade, and no money being spent to maintain or rebuild them.... then just how wise is it for the telecommunications giants to locate their data centers there?
..perhaps you should consider getting a friggin landline for when you're on call!
If you're an emergency doctor and you rely on mobile devices to get emergency calls you're an ass. A pager or mobile is fine in a hospital where theres always a backup PA system to call you , but its NOT fine when you're at home.
Exactly right!
Most bean counter types don't have a clue why they have all those over priced techies on the payroll, and when cost cutting comes along, they make an easy target.
I don't have to go around in bad weather fixing crappy equipment, as I'm a Network Analyst, but the details could easily fit my job.
Most of the time, I'm watching, monitoring, tweaking, updating, and so on. That's my job when the shit isn't hitting the fan. Most of the time I can avert disaster by seeing the shit before it hits the fan.
BTW, our department is going down to 60% of staffing, and when we were fully staffed we were "understaffed". I'm not sure how much longer I can keep the shit away from the fan.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Yeah, I can believe this happens elsewhere on a more regular basis. The emergencies were from exactly what you said: snapped trees, downed powerlines, etc. My neighbor had one 40-foot elm split down the middle and land on his roof, and a similarly-sized maple tree uprooted from the weight of the ice -- as it fell, it took out the transformer on a nearby power pole, then landed on his truck. Ouch.
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Here in Des Moines, I lost EDGE data service all morning but could still call out and receive calls. I tried every customer number for AT&T but got the "all offices are closed, call next business day" and there was no message (automated or otherwise) about outages. I was left to wonder if it was an account problem, etc. (WiFi worked fine). Even after service was restored in the early afternoon (locally) there was no message or information regarding the outage, nor any info to be found on their website. Less than impressive customer care.
...that is why in America we'll keep replacing the power lines above ground instead of putting them underground.
I rarely use it. Actually, I never do, thinking about it. But one thing is certain: It will work in an emergency situation. It is independent from the local electricity (powered by the telco, don't ask me the details), cables are down in the ground (so even a citywide fire would do little harm to them, provided the switching boxes last, which they should do, being in fireproof environments), whatever insanity happens I will most likely get to hear a dialtone when I pick up.
Call me paranoid, but considering what I pay for insurance, the landline is pretty cheap.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Put the keylock on and dial 112, 911 or 999 on any mobile, watch as it punches straight through the keylock and will dial. It will place the call over any mobile network it can reach, roaming or otherwise. Now try it with no credit on a pay as you go SIM. still works. Now take the SIM out. Still works.
I have AT&T in Indianapolis. At my house, I normally have at least 4 bars of service. Last month, it went to complete "No Service", because apparently the tower servicing my area was having issues. When I called AT&T, it took going to seven different support representatives before I could actually find someone who could look at their network monitoring data and tell me a tower went down. Knowing that they knew it was a problem, I figured it would be quickly resolved. NO SIR! They said it would be 2 weeks before they could get someone to fix the tower. If a major carrier such as AT&T can't get a single tower fixed in under 2 weeks, I really have zero faith that they'd be able to respond quickly to an emergency situation such as this. I suspect it will take months if not years before service is back to normal, if their service times they told me are accurate.
today is spelling optional day.
Nope. Does not stand in ANY court of law.
A contract is a contract is a contract between humans.
Any court will first overrule this piece of crap and rule AT&T is liable to compensate for loss of service contracted for.
Declaration of War, Dealings with enemy and illegal items for contract are the only ones NOT enforceable by a court.
All others are strictly enforceable whatever be the cause, including but not limited to storms, rains, snow, hail, sleet, fire or loss of life of employees.
Not that am heartless, but a Corporation has no soul and no heart. If i was snowed in and could not make my mortgage payment, the bank will foreclose on me, notwithstanding 10-feet of snow in my town.
Similarly, when dealing with corporations, leave your heart and soul at the door.
Deal with logically and legally to the letter.
If they make a single mistake, however small, screw them completely. They would do the same to you.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
Will AT&T send me a check for the days my service was out?
They won't send you a check, unless you happen to have a balance in your favor when you terminate your account. Call your carrier and request a credit because of a service outage - if you are polite and a good customer (e.g., pays on time) they will give it to you...even if it was due to weather.
Am I the only person that expected this to be about the Storm network doing a DDoS, or some such, to AT&T's network...
Can't keep my phones apart without a scorecard.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
A Credit is NOT the same as a check.
Reimbursement needs to be in the same terms of original contract.
You don't give them CREDIT for providing you service. They take your money: period.
Similarly, ask for a check or money order sent to your address. If they refuse, sue them in small claims court for violating a contract.
Why should you accept CREDIT when they don't accept yours?
A Credit is just an interest-free loan to these guys.
Refuse to accept unilateral changes to your contract and demand the repayment from them in check or cash.
Better yet, do the following:
1) Send a registered letter to their local office demanding financial compensation for the days not in service and quote the contract. Give them 7 calendar days to pay (not working days).
2) Wait for 7 days and when they don't respond, file a complaint with small claims court. Ask the clerk to send a notice to their local exchange in telephone directory with another 7 calendar days to respond.
3) They still wont respond for $5 or $10.
4) Enter a default judgment. Tell the judge they insulted him/her by deeming this court to be beneath their status (appeals to vanity and not logic). The judge will be furious on their own to consider MAXIMUM enforcement.
5) Get the judge to declare that AT&T is in default of a debt to you. This is very important. Because this disassociates the original contract from the debt. In other words, in the eyes of law, AT&T is indebted to you for the said amount as if they borrowed money from you (in a way true).
5) Now the judge will ask what do you want to do: Request that the judge allows you to seize their assets for payment of this debt. Get a bailiff order.
6) Call your close friends/relatives and state there (from a pay phone or get somebody else to call) to gather at the local AT&T office for a fire sale.
7) Get the Sheriff and a deputy. Go to the AT&T office and paste the order to their door stating their assets are being seized for discharging a debt. Throw every employee out. Ask any protesters to be considered as disobeying a judge's order.
8) Ask the sheriff to seize their equipment and conduct an auction at the doors with Sheriff and his officers as guards.
9) Your friends and relatives should have arrived by now. Make them bid 10 cents or 20 cents for iPhones, telephones, routers, computers, etc., and sell it to them at that price.
10) Finish the sale within 15 mins enough to collct your debt. The longer you delay, the exponential the probability that some retarded employee will call a AT&T lawyer who gets the judgment suspended.
11) Now you have a nice collection of worthy items for the $10 you were owed by AT&T. Plus AT&T credit is screwed because you had a lien and auction of their property.
If you had owed 30 cents on a mortgage that was overdue, ANY bank would do the same to you.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
Wrog. Force Majure clauses have most certainly been upheld in courts, in the US and India. I'd recommend not waiting until the last minute to remit your mortgage payment.
Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
Well apparently he DID have a landline, if you bothered reading the post. Of course and landline doesn't help if he had to do something important for himself or his family; buy gas for a generator, food, whatever. A cell phone makes him reachable no matter where he is, a landline does not.. which is likely why they called his cell first. Of course, nobody seems to know AT&T dropped the ball, and so didn't bother with the landline.. they assumed the cell network was fine.
OMG I CANT TEXT ANYONE! IM GOING TO DIE! Why so serious? Back when everyone was on land lines if we had an ice storm the lines were down. No phone service. Now that we have cell towers every couple miles you expect them to work 100% of the time? A cell tower has to be connected to a land line somewhere, and it needs power. If the power is out or the land lines are down, so is your cell tower. People couldn't wait to abandon their land lines then they bitch about not being able to get good cell service in every arm pit in the country. And now when I'm up in the mountains staying in a nice secluded cabin in the woods I get to sit on the porch and look up at the cell towers blinking away all night. So much for the view but I get 3 bars. Now people can call and pester me anywhere I go. Thank goodness for progress.
You cell phone users just don't get it, do you?
One of the major reasons why they want you away from your landline service is that they don't have to comply with the state or fed rules, tariffs, and laws forcing them to maintain POTS service even through the worst of weather.
Lose a cell tower? Fine, two weeks to get it back up.
Lose a phone line, depending on your state, from 12 hours to a working week in compliance with PUC regulations (in Texas it's 5 days, then Austin gets froggy).
Business landline goes down, 3-5 hours, as fast as a tech can get on site after getting pulled from a lower priority job.
Business cell service breaks, ok, duh, you get the point now?
What is $15-$25/mo for basic POTS service that is there when you need it in comparison to $60+ cell service that is still not as dependable as we like it to be?
I'll keep my POTS service and call forward from it to my cell, keeps the telemarketers at bay.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
Yep -
All service providers have clauses in their contracts that get them out of liability for these situations. From AT&T's wireless service agreement (go to http://www.wireless.att.com/learn/articles-resources/wireless-terms.jsp, then click on "Terms of Service"):
"WE DO NOT GUARANTEE YOU UNINTERRUPTED SERVICE OR COVERAGE. WE CANNOT ASSURE YOU THAT IF YOU PLACE A 911 CALL YOU WILL BE FOUND."
[...]
They then go on to basically say that they are not liable for any interruptions in their service for pretty much any reason.
They do state, however, that if your service is interrupted for more than 24 hours, you can call them and ask for a refund.
My experience is that even if you're out for less than 24 hours, they'll sometimes give you a small refund if you just ask nicely.
Basically, with cell providers (and consumer-grade ISPs, and anyone else that normally provides a continuous service), they obviously want to have as close to 100% uptime as they possibly can, but they don't want to be sued if they don't. These clauses in the contract prevent them from being sued... but they can't prevent them from losing customers. What keeps them as reliable as they (normally) are, is market forces. If you're too unreliable, you'll lose customers.
My ISP, who will go nameless, is a great example... Now, they've been incredibly reliable for me, but when I signed up and read their terms of service, it basically says that they could provide zero uptime for an entire billing period, and you still have to pay them. Again, I really think that's just so they can't be sued, and I have no doubt that they make every effort to keep their network up and running as well as possible.
Why, no, I haven't meta-moderated lately. Thanks for asking!
In the aftermath of Ike, the most reliable mode of communication I had (I have no land lines) were text messages. I wasn't surprised. I experienced the same thing during Katrina. And I had seen discussion of this elsewhere - to include Slashdot.
No, I don't know for fact that they don't have adequate power backup. I do know for fact that they didn't loose their roof. I also know, as I live in the general area, that other than a few trees down here and there, power was the only problem.
I certainly didn't see anything about trees falling on datacenters in the storm reports I've read through. I have, however, read about many many people being out of power because of the winds.
That's fine. If a tornado ripped through their datacenter, I could see that being Force Majeure. Failure to have a backup generator (or other power protection mechanism) is not force majeure and you would be hard pressed to find a judge that would say otherwise. Failure to have power for any reason is considered a predictable event that any datacenter operator should be able to deal with for 24 hours.
He said he had a pager. That counts as backup.
I just survived 11 days without power in central Massachusetts. Though how much of that was really necessary because of devastation due to the ice storm (which really was devastating) and how much was due to penny pinching by the gas & light company, remains to be seen, there is an ongoing investigation.
Outgoing calls work because the tower doesn't have to phone home to make an outgoing call. Incoming calls don't work because the tower near you has to contact the primary tower in the city where your cell phone's phone number is registered to tell it that the phone is currently hanging off a different tower. What is probably happening here is that the inter-tower communication is not working. This is probably because of the same trunk line failure that is causing the data to not work. In other words, chances are, the tower near you is working fine, but your home tower (wherever that is) is dead as a doornail.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Damn that global warming...er, climate change!!
perhaps you should consider getting a friggin landline for when you're on call!
If you're an emergency doctor and you rely on mobile devices to get emergency calls you're an ass.
Perhaps someone would like to explain:
It will be an interesting read.
I've always wondered what do people do that have dropped their landline service for cell/VOIP/Cable only service when they have a multi-day power outage? We've seen these outages after Hurricanes in the South/texas areas as well as ice storms in the midwest and northeast. In the recent ice storm (~2weeks ago) in NewEngland, all hardware stores had large signs up out front that said 'No Generators', I even heard of one guy that drove from NH to CT to get a generator.
And neither are technology problems.
In 1998 Maine suffered the worst ice storm in decades. Power, telephone, and cellular service were affected. Yes, cable TV also.
In Gray, Maine, I was without power for 11 days. My sister in Searsport was without for 17 days, 2 of which were unnecessary - her house was about a quarter-mile in the woods, and the crews missed her line. She had power restored a few hours after calling in and reporting she was still out, and could see lights on at neighbors' houses. Darn.
Among the events that would inform the Midwest utilities:
1. Bangor Hydro-Electric, serving North-Central and Downeast Maine reported virtually 100% loss of transmission lines and 100% of customers affected. Central Maine Power reported most customers affected north of Portland, and most transmission lines down. Both utilities reported to major customers that restoration would take weeks, and they pretty much beat thet estimate. Not bad for rebuilding either 70% or 100% of their transmission network. BHE in particular had to replace completely many miles of hi-v transmission line, with poles snapped off. Availability of basic equipment like insulators became the limiting factor. In light of this, customers such as Verizon and cell carriers were told they were genuinely SOL.
2. The Verizon maintenance supervisor for the state had just relocated from Cape Cod, where he survived a similar event a year earlier. He immediately commandeered all generators, battery packs for SLCs etc, and emergency equipment from Mass, lower NY state, and beyond. Upstate NY was also affected and could spare nothing. His actions permitted his team to keep swapping the batteries out of SLCs, recharging them, and swapping to keep basic phone service running. He also asked for and got fuel from the Maine National Guard to keep the trucks and generators running. Most gas stations were down for lack of power.
3. As is the nature of winter storms, power lines suffer the most because they are highest on the poles. Telephone is next, and cable TV is usually lowest and suffers the least. Cable companies didn't bother much for restoration, since TV is the luxury you give up when the generator needs more gas than you have. Thankfully, this also meant most telephone service survived, and all they had to do was keep their gensets running. 'That's All'... It was a massive effort.
4. Cell service then was TDMA and CDMA, and NAMPS. It was good, despite the problems of the carriers having to do their own bucket-brigade battery swapping. They did terrically.
5. From my observations, quick action by carriers to put plans into action, clever thinking, and looking beyond the usual boundaries of support saved the day.
6. And one saving grace - the NBC affiliate in Portand broadcasts on Channel 6. Audio was available on most FM radios, way down on the band. When HD kicks in, this will be lost. No replacement I see.
It appears that AT&T is caught here with a central switch/datacenter that is stranded. We'll dissect their planning, no doubt, but ultimately they needed to plan for a week of power failure. I know that sounds preposterous, but my hospital clients at the time were even parking water trucks in the lot in case power outages resulted in public water supplies failing. Diesel tankers also came in. One hospital had backup privileges with a sister facility in Pennsylvania, and we would have transferred back-office processing there and flown/driven key personnel for a week to keep paychecks, billing, and patient care data current. Fortunately, my old stomping grounds were no longer my business. That hospital was out for 5 days, and ended up with a National Guard generator on site. The Guardsmen went without power for their armory to do that, sleeping in trucks and tents. Fortunately, it was not that cold for January. If it was 10 degrees colder, a lot of people would have died, never ready for that sort of trouble.
I escaped to friends in New Hampshire. Yes, I'm a wuss.
AT&T should own up to bad planning, despite the unusual weather. Redundancy is crucial, expensive, and worth it.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
My phone was the only one I know personally to have had issues yesterday. My wife, her parents and my parents all had working cell phones through AT&T all day yesterday. From about noon until about 9 PM I could not make or recieve any calls or SMS after several reboots and a swapped SIM card from my local AT&T retailer. WTF? I understand how a data-center failure could cause widespread issues, but how does it only affect some people and not all from the area?
Said, "It's just like dice but it's got more sides And it tells me who lives and who dies"
Never had a call drop? Never been someplace where there is "no network"? Never had a conversation that you simply couldn't understand because of the "stacked" aggressive compression? C'mon! Thanks to the wireless companies, people have lower standards now, in terms of audio quality, reliability and availability. I used to work for Jabra years ago, before they had any market share and weren't really sure what direction to take. I was brought on to improve audio quality for various products. One was the small "all in ear" headset. It had terrible audio due to the lack of "proximity effect", there was really no way to "fix" this problem. I used to piss everybody off by calling it "an ear mounted speakerphone" in meetings. People would never accept the poor quality on land line phones (the headset market at that time). Poof! Along comes wireless and the lack of quality is expected by the consumer. Result: sell product and then company! People who have only a cell phone are nuts, and deaf!
My wife and I lost our AT&T service in Hyannis, MA on Christmas morning, and it's been sporadic ever since. When I called 12/26, the CSR mentioned the entire New England region had known issues with phone service, and they were working on it. This has been going on for 4+ days now with no updates... there are a bunch of threads going on AT&T's customer support forums with reports of others nationwide without coverage.
Is it fixed for you yet? I had no problems with SMS yesterday, and I made one call (turns out the place was closed, so no one answered). AT&T seemed to be working fine for me yesterday, so maybe your phone coincidentally is having issues.
"That clearly provides for a collective right and doesn't apply to the states..."
Seriously though, isn't it wonderful anti-gun nuts can't even make that weak argument anymore.
"The government grants you rights, not the other way around."-- beav007. Yes, these people really exist...
Wow. I knew there was a lot of buzz about the new Blackberry , but I didn't think it'd be enough to move all of AT&T's Midwest customers to Verizon. :-)
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
The wikipedia article I linked was not correct in many aspects. For instance, it said "The hardest hit areas were in the commercial area around White Oaks Mall and along Veterans Parkway". Actually the area by what is known to locals as the "Wabash Curve" in a line to south 9th street were the hardest hit, and a stretch of Dirkeon Parkway on the far east side of town. Dirkson was closed for weeks, as it was covered in utility poles.
A commercial building by the Wabash Curve (which no longer actually exists, it's now the intersection of Stanford, Wabash, and MacAurthur) had steel I-beam girders twisted. A short way up Wabash the Barrellhead lost its roof, and that's about as far west as the damage was.
Unfortunately we have to go by wikipedia's erroneous tale, as uncyclopedia doesn't have an entry.
The wikipedia article also neglects to mention the (on topic) infrastructure damage, which was extreme.
It mentions looting [citation needed], but there was no looting whatever. Wikipedia is the only mention of any looting. The areas that were hit were destroyed; there was nothing to loot.
Come on, wikiguys, fix the wikipedia.
Free Martian Whores!
In case some are from warmer climes and don't know what the fuss with ice storms is all about, here are a couple of damage scenes for your perusal. Basically, ice builds up on all external surfaces of a structure until either (a) the weight of the ice causes the structure to collapse, or (b) the surface area of the structure is increased to the point that the wind in the storm blows the structure over.
This is the KC1XX amateur radio contest station in Mason, New Hampshire, after the storm. More than 1.5 inches of radial ice.
Scroll down to December 12 and 14 in the maintenance and upgrade blog to see pictures of the ice storm damage at the K1TTT station in Peru, Massachusetts. His December 15 entry lists the damage, and subsequent entries begin the long process of rebuilding.
Dataoutages.com was the first to report this on their bb-outage list and on their blog at http://blog.dataoutages.com/ Up until then, the reps that I spoke with at AT&T didn't even know what was going on until they started checking around and found out about it through the RSS feed and then calling the techs.
Or, as part of the community which builds Wikipedia, YOU could fix it.
Nope. I gave up on editing wikipedia a long time ago, and it just keeps getting worse.
When I found I had a cataract, of course I hit wikipedia and looked up "cataract surgery". It was helpful, but the device that my doctor was to implant in my eye in place of its occluded lens wasn't listed, even though the FDA had approved its use three years earlier.
So I edited the entry, and added the acommodating lens, which my surgeon had implanted. Wikipedia mentioned the single focus IOLs that had been used since their invention in the late forties, and it mentioned multifocal IOLs that work somewhet like bifocal (trifocal) eyeglasses, but not the lens that would actually focus.
A week later my edit was edited out. Someone apparently didn't believe that they had invented a focusing lens implant, or one of Baush & Laum's competetitors didn't want anyone to know they existed.
I looked it up six months later and someone had re-edited it to add the CrystaLens. A week later and his edit, too, was undone.
So I'll just use wikipedia for non-critical research and quick lookups, and leave the editing to those who don't mind their efforts being vandalized. But if I'm quoting it here or anywhere else and there's an obvious error (the mall wasn't touched by the tornados and there was no looting) I'm going to call them on it.
Of course, uncyclopedia is even worse. Their article on crack was absolutely hilarious, but it has had all the humor excised and replaced with inane stupidity. Fortunately their article on kitten huffing is no longer editible. Oddly, my edit to its entry on slashdot (copountry) remains unvandalized and it is still funny. I added the quotes
"In Soviet Russia, slashdot trolls YUO!." ~ Russian Reversal on Slashdot
"On the streets these days, a dime bag of kittens costs a pretty penny." ~ Oscar Wilde on Slashdot's "offtopic" moderation
Speaking of which...
Free Martian Whores!
If you listen to the ENTIRE "our offices are closed" message, you are given an 800 number to their after hours call center.
That's where the message about the outage was.
Wrong place, if you ask me, but there it was.
All I lost yesterday was EDGE and GPRS, presumably 3G, as well, but I have no way to know for sure.
Incoming and outgoing calls both worked fine for me all day. Everything is working now.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
More and more!
Fnord.
As of 5pm in the Chicago area, I still don't have full service. I received a call, missed it and it went to voice mail. I tried from my home phone calling my cell to receive it and was surprised to get the message that my number was disconnected or no longer in service ....
As of 4:30 when I finally got a hold of AT&T, there was still no ETA for total resolution ....
I use to work for a cell phone company and can answer your question. Contact at&t and have them suspend your service for the period the service is out. You will get a prorated credit on your next bill. I remember taking calls from people like you. Almost without exception the person was a complete moron. Dont bother replying, I wont read it.
Doesn't stop people from emailing me to say they're having trouble with email. Usually turns out the trouble is a typo in the "To:" field which is clearly indicated by the error message that says, "This message could not be delivered because the user [ferd@somecompany.com] does not exist. Please check the address and try again."
Or they're really having email trouble and they wait a few hours before calling to ask why I haven't responded to their email.
Lawyers basically consider anything unexpected an act of god. For this reason, you always have to be careful in entering into a contract with a broad FM clause.
It might pay to have a spare, a pay-as-you-go phone for just such emergencies. Most of us wouldn't need that type of redundancy, but in your case (and the case of every doctor on call) it should be mandatory.
I'd love to change the world but I can't find the source code.
I bring up stories like this every time I hear an emergency manager say, "oh, we don't need ham radio anymore, we have cell and sat phones."
-- Ed Carp, N7EKG erc@pobox.com PGP KeyID: 0x0BD32C9B What I'm up to: http://intuitives.mine.nu
Generator... check
Icom 746.... check
folding dipole... check
I'm sorry, what are these phone things you were talking about?
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
During Ike, many land lines also failed.
1970's: A copper wire ran from the phone company to you. The phone company had their own generators or first dibs on regular power.
2000's: A plastic/glass fiber-optic wire goes to a local switch box. Local power with battery backup (SAME as cell phones) runs from the copper wire to your house.
2000's: in some subdivisions... the fiber actually goes down your street and there is no backup for the 60' of copper wire to it.
During Ike, My AT&T Cell phone randomly worked great while my friend's Verizon completely died. Something about being on the 3G network-- no idea why it worked and theirs failed.
However- electricity was a problem. From Rita, I had gasoline but Ike kind of stunned us (hit the day we were going to galveston on vacation -- we were sure it was going to be another "miss" 80-120 miles away but it was like a guided missle) and it took a couple days to realize this was serious and to find my inverter going (at least that gave me two lights, a fan, optionally a microwave, laptop, and roomba chargable vacuum cleaner (regular vac wouldn't run).
I should have a solar set up with battery (Xantex?) by next storm in addition to a generator (8-10 hours, will run a window unit, lights, a TV, and a laptop).
But --- Landlines are no longer reliable. I was without them for about 3 years entirely but for now have a $16 a month deal (that's after taxes!) from AT&T. 25 outgoing calls (10 cents after that). Mainly use it to find my cell phone when I lose it in the house.
I STOPPED using landlines tho - because the spam calls got so bad. I would get home to 10-15 messages- all trying to sell me things. I said, "I am not going to PAY AT&T for this kind of abuse any more on my frikkin unlisted number (which i pay them $1 to have)).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I spent Christmas in a GSM dead zone which is approx 5 miles from a fairly large population and an interstate. At my parents I get 0 bars with the AT&T logo which alternates to 1 bar and no signal depending on atmospheric conditions. A cloud rolled in at about 2AM whereupon I got those "merry christmas" text messages... ah nice to wake up to.
The threshold with which they paint these signal zones on their coverage map is ridiculous. Naturally it only works outdoors or in a window sill at certain times, only on one side of the house. Some parts of the house will work. Almost anywhere else I get great coverage (aside from lakes close to the afore mentioned area where summer holidays are spent). This is repeated at aunt's and grandma's but not the roads between.
Pretty much everyone in the town has Alltel and some crappy to passable CDMA tech (just from looking at them).
On another note:
The reason Japan and Korea can roll out awesome networks are social but mostly geographic. Look at Japan for instance. Surface area is tiny compared to US. Japan: 145840 square miles. Texas: 268601 square miles. Also Texas doesn't line up neatly on either side of a mountain range. Sure you can argue user density and back-haul capacity but c'mon that's just one state.
Act of God is the only clause available.
Hurricanes are no excuse for NOT making a payment on your mortgage and NOT an excuse for AT&T not providing you a telephone line in lieu of compensation.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
Yes he had a landline , but it appears he hadn't bothered to give the number to anyone!
Not really -- your argument sounds attractive, but is not always the best. People always have these grand fantasies about reaching doctors on call, but added redundancy does not always help. If something works 99.9% of the time, it is probably "good enough" for the expense, given redundancy already exists.
If docs were issued a prepaid phone for home call (would have to be an entirely different network e.g. Verizon(CDMA) vs AT&T's GSM), most likely somebody would forget to charge it (rarely used: I would estimate once every couple years) or forget to add minutes (most of them have expiring minutes over time), or the physicians would not want to carry it (another thing to carry / charge / drop / break / lose / clip to the belt with four other things.) The numbers would get mixed up -- would you rather have one number for the busy nurse to call at every nursing station / call operator, or 4 in decreasing order? Everything has to be grounded in practicality. A good paging network as cellphone backup is better.
A typical physician setup is email/blackberry for nonurgent, long communications (e.g. patients to see tomorrow AM when you get to the hospital.) For urgent communications most docs rely on a cellphone, and also carry a pager for the reliability (far above 99%) and increased range (much better than cellphone.) Landlines, as some of the people insinuated, are of course only practical when sitting at home or in an office.
Thus, my blackberry went out, cellphone went to VM, and the pager came through for me. An additional cellphone might have helped, but possibly not. If my pager happened to be out also, they would have overhead paged me throughout all hospitals I cover, which I would have heard and called back (this is how they did it in the old days anyway, and I was in a hospital at the time.) If I didn't hear this, they would have called my home, but I wasn't home anyway.
If all this failed, they would have called a colleague of mine. If he just got in a car crash, they would have called an in-house ICU doctor cover. If the in house intensive care doc just fell down the stairs and was out of commission, they would have called an on-call emergency doctor. If he was just kidnapped by terrorists, you're just being silly.
Point is, there's a lot of redundancy designed to make things safe already. There is generally decent technological support behind the basics. Electronic health records, that's another matter, and don't get me started... :p
Slashdotter, ID #101. UIDs are in binary, right?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Any random pigeon fart knocks out AT&T in these parts. And Cingular USED to be a great service. The root of todays corporate mergers : #1 Use every legal, barely legal and sometimes maybe legal trick to trash the value of your prey. #2 Once your grubby paws have the prize, employ ruthless slash and burn techniques to staff, equipment and services then sell off everything else possible, preferably at bargain basement prices to an offshore shell company under your discreet control. #3 PROFIT!!! Economies of scale my ass, defined accurately it means not much more than an enhanced ability to run over or strong arm competitors, customers, suppliers and employees, and in some rare cases even the creditors. No wonder the world economy has been trashed, yet again.
wabi-sabi
matthew
Could you point us to your edits? I glanced through the history of Cataract surgery, and didn't spot any edit where a mention of the CrystaLens was added or removed, although I may have missed it. Someone added a link to the CrystaLens to the Intraocular lens article back in August 2007, and as far as I can tell, it's been in there ever since... it's certainly mentioned right now.
The edit would have been some time in late 2006; I got the implant in June of that year.
I think I may try to edit the damned thing once more. We'll see if it holds, the device has been in use for five years now.
Free Martian Whores!