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. :)

Comments

Re:Roaming?

[zappepcs]

They are trying to fix it, much the same way that Sarbanes-Oxley fixes accounting problems. Communications providers are required to keep an 8 hour power backup on all sites and 24+ backup on 'important' sites like switching centers or something along those lines. The idea is that storms like those that hit New Orleans would not cause the problems that they did. This storm is exactly the thing this measure by the FCC is supposed to fix... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Legislators (Goodbye FCC) do NOT know how to run businesses. Some perhaps, but on the whole they are terrible business advisers and this legislation only proves it in the aftermath of this storm. I hold a harsh opinion of this situation because AT&T should have had backups in place to handle this situation. All Communications providers deal with such things and AT&T has enough history to know what to do... shame on them.

Re:Will AT&T repay me for the days my service

[cthulu_mt]

Most contracts include a "Force Majure" clause that absolves the service provider in the event of a natural disaster.

Re:Roaming?

[Shakrai]

AT&T/Comcast/AT&T burned a LOT of bridges when they became Cingular. I used to be able to roam almost anywhere, and if a roaming tower was the best strength I connected to that. After cingular got involved they pissed off a lot of other carriers. Now my phone refuses to talk to any nearby roaming towers but tries to connect to that single AT&T tower about 12 miles away that gives me barely any signal

I don't think that really has to do with burning bridges. It has to do with AT&T not wanting to pay money for you to roam. It costs them money every single minute that you are using another carriers network.

I used to have a T-Mobile phone (had to ditch them for Verizon when I moved in with the GF -- no signal at her house) and they did the same thing. They would disable roaming on AT&T/Cingular in areas where they had coverage. Even if you were in a zone with no T-Mobile service you couldn't hop onto Cingular. To be able to roam on Cingular you had to drive out of the county where T-Mobile had native coverage -- then you'd be able to connect to and use the Cingular network. If you were within the county where they had native service but happened to be in a dead zone you were SOL -- roaming wasn't allowed.

I have to hack my phones to disable this configuration to get decent cellphone service out of them.

I'm surprised that worked. With GSM your home network decides whether or not you will be allowed to connect to that roaming partner based on the location area code. If that LAC indicates an area where they have native service they probably won't let you connect to the roaming partner. If it indicates an area where they don't have native service then you stand a better chance of being allowed to use that roaming partner.

Not a conspiracy

[jmkaza]

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.

emergency calls do whatever it takes

[dominux]

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.

Re:Roaming?

[awyeah]

There are two things at play here: The ability to control network selection on the handset, and what the cellular networks allow you to do.

On GSM devices, there's a flag on the SIM card that tells your phone whether or not to show you the "manual network selection" menu. With AT&T, their SIM cards are configured to disable this menu when you're in the US, but enable it when outside the US.

However, on many devices, you can force them to ignore the SIM setting and have manual network selection enabled always. With Motorola phones, you can do it via SEEM editing, and there's obviously a way to do it on Symbian as well. This is what Lumpy is doing.

Shakrai, what you're talking about is the actual roaming agreements between providers. This also affects network selection. Providers can specify which phones are allowed on their network. Legally, all phones must be allowed to associate with all GSM towers to provide 911 capability, but they can be limited to just that. For example, when I only have T-Mobile coverage, my AT&T BlackBerry shows "SOS" where the signal bars usually are.

AT&T and T-Mobile have been doing this for a while. They had roaming agreements where specific cell sites would allow the other operator's phones in areas where the other operator's coverage was spotty.

So when Lumpy uses manual network selection on his phone, which he had to enable by modifying something, the rules that the operators set forth on their networks still apply. If he tries to associate with a T-Mobile tower in certain areas, he will most likely get locked out, but in other areas he may not.