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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?
If AT&T's service was down, how would they send you a text or voicemail?
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.
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
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!
.. 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.
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.
...that is why in America we'll keep replacing the power lines above ground instead of putting them underground.
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.