Verizon Drops 10,000 911 Calls During Blizzard

mschaffer noted a Bloomberg piece saying "US regulators said Verizon Communications Inc.'s networks may have dropped a 'truly alarming' number of wireless emergency calls during a snow storm last month, and asked the carrier to investigate." The article says 10,000 calls failed to connect during one blizzard. Can't wait to see what all those AT&T migrators think.

Comments

Obligatory

[inKubus]

911, Can you hear me now?

Re:Obligatory

[raitchison]

Called it ;)

Re:Obligatory

[Bitcloud21]

I admit it. I chuckled at this.

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[Anonymous Coward]

And during the same period of time in the same place, AT&T didn't drop any calls? Was the question even raised? Is this even considered journalism?

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[jeffmeden]

"I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have called and dropped...
...Than never to have called at all"

-Alfred Tennyson

Re:Obligatory

[KshGoddess]

911 is a tricksy beast, and when you combine RF issues, like rain fade (snow fade - which is less, but still noticeable) and location services (which tell the carrier WHICH 911 center to route the call to) ... 10k dropped 911 calls out of ... how many total placed calls? How was this data collected? Was there a record of 10,000 dropped calls that actually connected to 911? Is this from a log from their switches covering that area? How did their competitors fare? So much is so vague about this article, that it makes my head spin.

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[treeves]

It's not *obligatory* when only one person would ever consider writing it.

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[RooftopActivity]

Why not ask the writers?

To contact the reporter on this story: Todd Shields in Washington at tshields3@bloomberg.net To contact the editor responsible for this story: Allan Holmes at aholmes25@bloomberg.net

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[Anonymous Coward]

The calls were dropped because the trunks (over which calls flow) were disabled in software. Nothing to do with "rain fade" or some abstract wireless issue.

The open questions are:
Why were they disabled?
How can Verizon be sure this won't happen again?
(is this in fact a repeat occurrence of a fault Verizon previously "fixed" indicating that the answer above is "it will happen again"?)
What action, if any, was taken in response to the automatic alarms (911 trunks are alarmed, and the logs show alarms tripped) ?
Can Verizon enable the endpoints to be alarmed too? (911 endpoints have a plan if they know 911 is down, but if only one provider is down that may not be obvious for hours)

The answer to your (and several other people's) key question is: Nobody else dropped their 911 trunks resulting in thousands of failed calls to 911. So there are no comparable statistics for other carriers. It's as if one brand of Cola was contaminated causing hundreds of people to die, and you asked if maybe it's unfair reporting and the other brands all causes large numbers of deaths normally and so it's not a big deal.

Re:Obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

By the way, the part that's really outrageous is the lack of response to alarms. I get woken in the middle of the night if our external monitoring systems detect a problem or cannot contact our services. I don't provide 911, just a paid-for service to high value customers. If I can get out of bed and fix problems at 3am (and make sure such problems are rare so that I don't have to) then Verizon can afford to pay people to do to the same.

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[timeOday]

All of which makes the FCC's response completely appropriate: "The agency wants Verizon to investigate the extent of the problem across its network, he said. " Sounds like they are starting at step 1: assess the situation. A voluntary self-assessment, for that matter.

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[lxs]

No the part that is really outrageous is that they are asked to investigate themselves, and were not ordered to comply with an external investigation.

Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[raitchison]

Seriously, 10,000 911 calls is a huge number, even if 911 is being abused there were no doubt a lot of calls from people trapped in their homes (for people who have ditched their landlines) or cars. Imagine an elderly person in their home when the heat goes out, in those cold temperatures that can become life threatening very quickly.

Things like this are one of the main reasons we pay ~$25/mo for a land line despite having 5 active cell phones in the house on 2 separate networks (not to mention a few inactive ones that can still call 911) I know that if the excrement hits the air circulator that I will have more options to reach people than finicky mobile networks.

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[h4rr4r]

I lived for two weeks in the buffalo winter without heat when i first moved in. With some blankets and a sleeping bag you can do fine.

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[ElectricTurtle]

If your emergency plan for a SHTF scenario is 'dial 911' I would respectfully submit that your plan is a bit deficient.

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[Gohtar]

I have survived 2 Utah winters with no heat. +1 on blankets. And can their 911 service even handle that call load?

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[raitchison]

You might or I might be fine, but I was talking specifically about elderly people without a lot of stamina, especially problematic for a widow who's never had to worry about how to deal with the cold in her entire lifetime.

In general, many people have become soft thanks to modern life.

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[Anonymous Coward]

I don't bother to have the land line anymore because when times get tough enough for it to be the last option, well, things are so tough you're not going to be able to get someone on the other end anyways...

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[GooberToo]

Things like this are one of the main reasons we pay ~$25/mo for a land line despite having 5 active cell phones in the house on 2 separate networks (not to mention a few inactive ones that can still call 911) I know that if the excrement hits the air circulator that I will have more options to reach people than finicky mobile networks.

Keep in mind, they said, "Verizon", not, "Verizon Wireless." That likely means your land line would have had its 911 calls dropped too.

Like you, emergencies are the only reason I still have a land line. Its a good bet to hedge. But even land lands can fail in a variety of ways. On the other side of the spectrum are those who have services like Vonage. When the power is out, so is your phone. So its really the worst or false security.

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[Anonymous Coward]

I lived in Buffalo for 20 years it's doesn't get that cold in the winter there. Lake Erie keeps things warmer than they would normally get.

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[h4rr4r]

You can dial 911 on any land line without service. If your shit hits the fan scenario is to call 911 you are screwed. Lots of other folks will be calling at the same time.

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[MozeeToby]

This call volume doesn't make sense to me. Doing some admittedly very rough estimations: The entire population of the Washington DC metro area is 5.4 million. Now figure all the people that were grouped, either at home or in a car or stuck at work, and I suspect you'd have closer to 2 million groups. Some number of those are going to have a landline available so call it 1.8 million groups. If we assume there is only a single cell phone available per group (obviously a poor assumption) and the fact that Verizon has a nationwide market share of about 30% you come up with 600,000 people relying solely on Verizon wireless for their emergency communication.

That means that 1 out of 60 groups would have had to have been calling 911. Granted, some possibly large number of those calls were probably repeated attempts by the same people but still. Were people really that unprepared for the blizzard? It isn't like no one saw it coming, the news agencies were talking about it days before it arrived and people in DC could have watched all the problems that it had caused throughout the Midwest before it got that far east. Living in the Midwest, with significantly less warning time I can tell you that people did their grocery shopping the days before, stayed home from work (either on vacation or closed businesses), and had some kind of secondary heating source available for at least some of their house. If those numbers are at all accurate then there is a basic failing of our society to take basic and necessary precautions for your own safety. Getting stuck in 12 inches of snow on the freeway during a blizzard is not a failure of anyone but the idiot who got on the freeway in those conditions in the first place.

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[raitchison]

Perhaps it's just a small part of my plan, I've got a small generator, stored water + non-perishable food, not to mention camping gear, even if I don't need to call 911 it might be helpful to reach out to loved ones.

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[h4rr4r]

Let me clarify, West Seneca. Which might not get that cold, but colder than right on the lake. Those weeks it only got down to single digits at night. I have also gone camping in the Alaska winter, that was double digits negative. Both seem to have not killed me.

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[maxume]

Why is 2 weeks the magic number?

Hell, if you are mostly healthy and have access to water, 5 or 6 days without food is barely dangerous, probably mostly uncomfortable.

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[h4rr4r]

The last time we had a real ice storm in my area Power and phone failed at the same time. When big trees break and take the lines right off the poles that happens. Cell phones were working again before land lines in many areas. Phones are not security in bad weather.

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[ElectricTurtle]

Good to hear. The reason I mention it is that it seems like most people today have a 'somebody else will save me!' attitude and end up being very, very disappointed by the results.

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[h4rr4r]

Because any longer than that and you can pretty much bet modern civilization totally failed. Two weeks is just a little longer than it should take to get power back to pretty much anywhere. You try 5 or 6 days without food in the middle of winter with no heat and let me know how it works out for you.

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[Anonymous Coward]

They should get some cheap +stam enchants. Sheesh. :)

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[Midnight Thunder]

I suppose the other questions to be asking are:
  - how much impact did the blizzard have on signal quality?
  - how good was that signal quality to start with?
  - how many of those calls were reattempts?
  - how good is the insulation in the homes in that area?

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[Tr3vin]

Frailer bodies have more difficulty in producing and maintaining the required body heat. It is easier for a younger healthier person to keep their core temp up. Blankets only go so far, and an older person may not be able to keep warm enough.

There is also the awareness to get some extra blankets out. They may go to bed feeling fine, but then have hypothermia set in over night. At that point, you start to shut down and you aren't thinking too well. More than likely, they would remain where they are instead of getting up to find more warmth.

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[Anonymous Coward]

What good is 911 in an emergency? No...I'm totally, utterly serious. For certain definitions of emergency...

In the event, *YOU* have an emergency that isn't impacting everyone else...okay, you're paying $25/month for what amounts to insurance that you have a land line to dial in if the cell network fails. Fine. Valid case.

In the event there is a local/county/state/national emergency--and you dial 911. Congrats, you're emergency caller number ... let's say 35 in a list of a thousand. The cops will be with you right after they've dealt with the other 34 people coming first. Assuming nobody else in that list is worse prepared than you are and gets triaged up. You're running out of insulin? Sorry, you won't be in a coma for 8 hours--there's elderly living alone and freezing now.

Maybe...if you or someone near you had a heart attack...during a catastrophic blizzard. And emergency services triaged you to the top. Maybe...maybe then you'd have a use case. I'm not convinced.

Of course, all this assumes that local emergency services doesn't pull a Katrina and
    1) flee first
    2) show up and confiscate your supplies
    3) outright rob you and/or shoot you in the back if you resist.

That $25 a month in your landline would probably be better spent on ammunition, candles, blankets, a fire extinguisher, or even a well trained dog.

Just sayin...

I get you're hedging, but I don't think it's a very effective ROI of that $300/year.

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[commodore6502]

Yep. I know it's old-fashioned but in my whole life I've never seen the landline go out, even during blackouts. Plus it's good for internet backup. (When the DSLAM died, the netzero/dialup still worked.)

>>>we pay ~$25/mo for a land line

Wow. I only pay $10 for unlimited, while my parents have $5 per-call billing (they don't call out much). You may be paying more than you need to.

>>>(not to mention a few inactive ones that can still call 911)

I have an old analog phone from 1999. You think that would still call 911? Last I heard analog is no longer supported? Maybe I'll sell it on ebay (although the glowing green LED is kinda Matrix-like).

>>>if the excrement hits the air circulator

Just send out Twiki with a personal message.
"Biddi biddi biddi - like - far out Buck!"

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[h4rr4r]

Try it.

Lines without service in the USA by law have tone and will dial 911 or let you order service. If you dial any other number it tells you that you do not have service and asks if you would like to get it.

The wikipedia article covers it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9-1-1

The FCC rule can be found
http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Common_Carrier/Reports/FCC-State_Link/IAD/pntris99.pdf

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[Bill_the_Engineer]

I don't think stamina was the right word.

The body's ability to regulate it's core body temperature diminishes with age. This is why the elderly is more prone to hypothermia in the winter and heat strokes in the summer. Blankets may help but the lower metabolism that the elderly may have would make it necessary to have an additional heat source to help warm the blankets initially, recover any heat being lost through the blankets, or when they have to get out from underneath the blankets to relieve themselves.

Loss of heat when the elderly is present is an emergency situation and warrants an effort to find alternative accommodations.

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[GooberToo]

Cell phones were working again before land lines in many areas. Phones are not security in bad weather.

The problem with cell phones is they are far, far more likely to reach capacity limits before land lines. Not to mention they require charging. And when towers go down, the phone goes into maximum TX power to reach a tower, which can drain a battery in hours, leaving you with no phone at all, even after high priority items like towers are brought back on line.

While not always true, as your story illustrates, land lands have a very long, long history of reliability in the worst of conditions. This is not even close to true for cell technology.

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[sabt-pestnu]

> If you don't have...

Some other things whose lack might invoke your "miserable death":

A 2 week supply of water. You don't think public water supplies are going to remain stable, do you? And if you're talking about "death by cold", then you're also talking "pipes freeze". And since you're talking about using sleeping bags and blankets to keep yourself warm, that same water supply needs to be in meltable chunks. You'll be a sad panda when you find your 5 gallon buckets are 5 gallon blocks of ice. ... and sadder when the heat comes back on and you find they split...

Emergency sanitation. Frozen pipes. Two weeks. you do the math. And if you're talking "can't open the door because of the snow", don't tell me "just do it outside in the snow".

Your own home. You honestly think you can store all of that in a studio apartment? If you do, where are you going to put the sleeping bag down at?

I'll point out as well that the "old widow", being "old" may well not be able to generate enough heat on her own to keep from freezing, even with the best of insulation. It takes a lot of calories to do that kind of thing, and you have to be able to USE those calories, which an old person may well not be acclimatized to.

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[maxume]

I'm sure I would hate it (and I usually do have quite some days of this or that dry food, it is easy to put the new stuff on the back of the shelf), but I'm also quite sure I would survive it, with basically zero issues.

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[Anonymous Coward]

I dropped my land line about 8 years ago specifically because it went out so often. No excuses, either. It wasn't winter, etc. When I called from my cell phone to cancel it, the operator tried to get me to keep it for emergencies if my cell went out, and I just pointed out I was using my cell to cancel because it was out of operation for the (at least) forth time that year that I knew about (since I almost never used it, it could have been much higher). She promptly said, "oh, right" and stopped reading the script and canceled my service.

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[Chris Mattern]

How much stamina does it take to go get some blankets out of the closet?

Not much. How much stamina does it take to survive the cold even when you have the blankets? More than some old people have.

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[Anonymous Coward]

You can still call 911 on an inactive landline.

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[Anonymous Coward]

If your emergency plan for a SHTF scenario is 'dial 911' I would respectfully submit that your plan is a bit deficient.

If you have a plan for it, it's not a SHTF scenario.

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[BlackSnake112]

If you lose heat or power you call 911? Really? In case people forgot most cities have emergency response centers. These centers are monitoring the power grid among other things. You are calling 911 to report a loss of power that they are already aware of.

If you lost power and a tree fell on your house trapping you inside or under part of the roof. Fine call 911. Just because the power went out? You are calling the wrong people. When I lost power I called the power company. If my heater breaks I call the people I have to fix the heater. I have had elderly neighbors (90+ years old). When we lost power in a winter snowstorm, I called the power company to let them know. I did check on my neighbors. We had oil forced air heat, but no power means no fan to push the air around. We had no heat when the power went out.

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[Solandri]

Things like this are one of the main reasons we pay ~$25/mo for a land line despite having 5 active cell phones in the house on 2 separate networks (not to mention a few inactive ones that can still call 911) I know that if the excrement hits the air circulator that I will have more options to reach people than finicky mobile networks.

I can't say if this is true everywhere, but the "inactive" landlines in the houses I've lived at still gave a dial tone. You can still use them to call 911 and toll-free (1-800, 1-888, etc) numbers. You don't have to pay the phone company $25/mo for them. I used to use it for making calls to toll-free support and mail order companies, so I wouldn't rack up as many minutes on my cell phone back when they were relatively expensive.

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[corbettw]

Sleeping bags and blankets are fine, but hookers really help you keep warm when it's cold out. Though granted, that's only for an hour (unless you're Mr. Moneybags or something).

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[ColdWetDog]

And this is the real point. 911 is OK for individual emergencies - as a mechanism to deal with massive problems, it's never going to work. Landline or wireless. Verizon should indeed look at how their system responded to the stress but society needs to get a clue - you can't always call daddy and have them pull your unprepared ass out of the ice. Yes, it can be a real problem for older / younger / disadvantaged folks but as a number of posters have demonstrating, survival in place isn't all that hard. The biggest issue is realizing that you might have to do it BEFORE the problem starts.

We could all come up with government lead systems for this sort of thing, but it rankles me to think that we're creating a society that absolutely has to have big brother deal with damned near everything. Everything tends to get expensive after a while...

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[ifrag]

Why is 2 weeks the magic number?

2 weeks is of course the length of time a zombie can last without eating brains. Assuming that the zombies did not get a chance to eat any of your neighbors you can now go exploring for food. The remaining difficulty is with migratory zombies, so there is still some chance of "miserable death" occuring.

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[cayenne8]

I've actually had to try to survive a couple of nights in New Orleans in dead of summer with NO air conditioning, man, that was brutal. I don't know how people lived and worked down here prior to the invention of AC, especially with all the damned clothes they work back then...whew.

I was shocked when I visited a friend from the NE area and found that MANY people don't even have AC in their houses?!?! I'd never seen that before really, growing up in the south.

I guess the cold up there in analogous to our heat in the summer down here.

I''m usually not in a huge hurry for winter to be over...but with this weeks temps staying in the mid 70's, I have to guess the cold stuff is just about over for us down here.

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[kyrio]

Granny has a land line.

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[MBGMorden]

It certainly wasn't a tragedy or anything, but when I was a kid after Hurricane Hugo we went for over 45 days without power. Now, granted, that was a little over 20 years ago, but it'd still fall into the realm of what I'd call modern. I had a computer and video game systems I was praying for power to run :).

Overall though, you make due. We'd go to my uncle's house about a quarter mile away and use his hand powered water pump to fill buckets with water. Certain buckets were set aside and used for cooking (on propane powered camp stoves) - others for washing (spongebaths don't give you nice freshly showered feeling, but you still can stay relatively clean and keep water usage to a minimum).

I personally just don't get how people who live in disaster prone areas don't stock up on at least the basic stuff needed to survive for a while without outside contact. Down here in South Carolina snow storms, aren't really an issue, but hurricanes most certainly are. I keep a decent supply of water, a first aid kit, flashlights, batteries, candles, gasoline, propane, a generator, canned goods, a chainsaw, and a camp stove out in the garage. Barely takes up a small corner out there and a total investment of less than $1,000. It's cheap insurance.

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[GooberToo]

Some of what you said makes sense. Lots of what you said doesn't. Worse, some of what you said is nothing but ignorance.

Phone lines are used to established contact with the outside world. Sometimes its used to get help. Other times its used to assure loved ones you're okay.

You're also down playing the likelihood of cell going down versus land line. I every major emergency I've been in, either wireless went down or was so beyond capacity it was impossible to place a call. Receiving a call are iffy, but possible. Land lines, on the other hand, worked flawlessly so long as the attached phone didn't require power (this is another gotcha which gets lots of people).

As for truly having an emergency, you're just being silly. If I have a dire medical need, getting help is pretty important. Without contact to the outside world, I may not get help at all.

Of course, all this assumes that local emergency services doesn't pull a Katrina and
        1) flee first
        2) show up and confiscate your supplies
        3) outright rob you and/or shoot you in the back if you resist.

This is in fact, the ONLY SMART AND PROPER THING THEY CAN DO. PERIOD. I hate that stupid people have constantly spread so much ignorance about Katrina. Which is smarter? Leaving emergency crews and equipment to be destroyed and killed, effectively ensuring no assistance is available to anyone. Or, move them, as ALL EMERGENCY CREWS ARE TRAINED, to safe areas such that they can return and effectively do their job. The rest did happen but is hyperbole and has no basis in the current discussion. That's what happens when your police force are known to be criminals and the governor spits on the US Constitution.

That $25 a month in your landline would probably be better spent on ammunition, candles, blankets, a fire extinguisher, or even a well trained dog.

Not all. I have ammo, candles, blankets, and fire extinguisher. Using your logic, a dog is not cost effective. Nothing about this need be an either-or. And, candles, blankets, etc., are not going to get you medical care, fire assistance, police, or let your loved ones know you're okay. With your supplies, I'll safely see that I'm warm while I die. Attempting to argue against it is dumb.

And as an aside, my phone line costs $14/mo.

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[scubamage]

While I don't have a generator, I've got enough magnets and spare wire around that I could rig together a simple magneto if I am truly desperate for power and have some free time (something I think I'll have in abundance should I truly get stuck inside). I have a number of oil lamps + spare oil for light, I always have large bundles of dried oats, rice, and beans on hand. It won't be fancy, but its protein that'll keep your body from breaking down vital organs and carbs to keep you from dissolving too much body fat. I don't have water on hand, however should it be a snow emergency a pyrex bowl of snow suspended over an oil lamp should melt snow into potable water pretty effectively. As for heat, I have a number of blankets due to being too cheap to usually turn the heater above 50 without my girlfriend coming to visit (like Scrooge, cold is cheap, and I like it). Its not much, but I think I should be able to get by, even without power.

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[WrongSizeGlass]

I've actually had to try to survive a couple of nights in New Orleans in dead of summer with NO air conditioning, man, that was brutal.

You should have tried some blankets. I've recently read that they work wonders.

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[Culture20]

You try 5 or 6 days without food in the middle of winter with no heat and let me know how it works out for you.

I'm sure I would hate it (and I usually do have quite some days of this or that dry food, it is easy to put the new stuff on the back of the shelf), but I'm also quite sure I would survive it, with basically zero issues.

Fat slashdotters living in their mothers' basements are quite different from frail old ladies. The fat keeps us warm and provides needed chemical energy.

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[Locke2005]

You used to be able to dial 911 on any analog cell phone and every cellular provider had to accept the call, even if you weren't paying for service. For some reason, the wireless companies never advertised this fact! I'm not sure how the digital wireless networks handle this, but I suspect they are required to accept everyone's 911 calls too, regardless of whether they are in network or not.

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[scubamage]

All I can say is CB/short wave radio ftw.

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[bluefoxlucid]

I may have to keep several gallons of beer on hand. Of course, light pale ale, the good stuff, minimum hops, maybe 2.5% alcohol, the kind of shit you can hammer back like crazy and get "a little buzzed" from. Strong beer is not what I want; besides, I dislike it. It stores well, it's easy to handle, and enjoyable, and safe.

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[cayenne8]

"I personally just don't get how people who live in disaster prone areas don't stock up on at least the basic stuff needed to survive for a while without outside contact. "

I can answer that one pretty easily for myself, living in New Orleans.

When a storm is on the way, I just get the fuck out of town!!

I have never understood why some people want to stay and ride out the storm? I figure (unless it is a Katrina type disaster) it is basically gonna be about a 4x day or so vacation out visiting friends and relatives...and I'll head back when things are all clear.

I did stay once through a tropical storm..and power was out for me a couple days. I thought, why do this and be miserable again. I certainly don't like to be in NOLA in the middle of summer with no AC...why even stay to do that?

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[Ben4jammin]

No kidding...went 6 days with no power (from the city) in US-KY in the ice storm that hit a few years back.

At no point did it occur to me to dial 911...and we had from ages 2 to 70 in the house. I saw an article that said most people only have 3 days of food in their house...I have more than that in just soup.

By planning ahead, we had enough kerosene and food to get us through. I would add that if your plan doesn't include having some supplies on hand before the first flake falls, it really isn't a plan.

I always wondered of those homes that don't have over 3 day's food, how many have a big screen TV? Misallocation of resources is no accident

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[WrongSizeGlass]

You can dial 911 on any land line without service. If your shit hits the fan scenario is to call 911 you are screwed. Lots of other folks will be calling at the same time.

But a Stonecutter knows that the real emergency number is 912.

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[Duradin]

"Things like this are one of the main reasons we pay ~$25/mo for a land line despite having 5 active cell phones in the house on 2 separate networks (not to mention a few inactive ones that can still call 911) I know that if the excrement hits the air circulator that I will have more options to reach people than finicky mobile networks."

Landlines have very stringent QoS and uptime requirements. With the move to cell phones I'm surprised the ebil gov't hasn't put these job killing requirements on this no-longer-just-a-convenience industry.

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[GooberToo]

I'm sorry to hear that. That's not typical across the US. If the base service simply isn't reliable where you're at, that's certainly understandable. Having said that, for most people, land lands are rock solid and rarely, if ever, go down.

For what its worth, there are literally cities in the US which have worse power service than Iraq during its constant black and brown outs. No exaguration either.

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[Carewolf]

You can dial 911 on any GSM phone without service, you don't even need a SIM-card. It is required by the standard.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[afidel]

Very quickly? I turned off my heat on Sunday and the temp only dropped 1.5 degrees F per hour while I was away. It would become a problem in a day but a call not completing 'right now' isn't a big deal for heat. A MUCH bigger problem would be someone shoveling their driveway and having a heart attack.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[ElectricTurtle]

"In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable."

~Dwight D. Eisenhower

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[vlm]

How much stamina does it take to go get some blankets out of the closet?

Not much. How much stamina does it take to survive the cold even when you have the blankets? More than some old people have.

Its all very amusing watching southerners condescendingly babble about the elderly struggling in unsurvivable 32 degree F weather, but PLEASE recall that there are actually people in Canada over the age of 50! Grandparents are not simply placed on ice floes and pushed out to sea up here. In fact I have heard a rumor there are people in northern Wisconsin over the age of 80! And not just surviving, but thriving.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[Locke2005]

I had a childhood friend who used to sleep with his dog on the floor with the window open. In midwinter. In the interior of Alaska. Of course, this same guy used to go barefoot in snow sometimes too. The point is, you CAN get used to cold if you have a fast enough metabolism to keep your body temperature up and enough food (proper clothing helps too). I've been outside in 60 below weather myself (not -60 Fwith windchill, but actual thermometer reading of -60 F). It made it really easy to tell where the thin spots were in my down parka, but I survived it.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[tripleevenfall]

these "finicky mobile networks" are just that, a network. whereas you are opting for a single point of failure. !better

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[bberens]

I certainly don't like to be in NOLA in the middle of summer with no AC...why even stay to do that?

I believe the word is poverty.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[h4rr4r]

You can dial 911 without service. By law all phones connected to the network must be capable of dialing 911.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9-1-1

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[drinkypoo]

Some people have nowhere to go and no money to go anywhere if they did. I certainly think they should pack up and move someplace cheaper and poorer where they can live... assuming they can work for the same amount of money there which is seldom true. Perhaps you propose creating a public fund for providing for storm evacuation?

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[HiThere]

Blankets wouldn't suffice, but with proper insulation heat isn't really a problem. Of course then you need to worry about suffocation. And I don't mean because of pressure. With really good insulation a single candle can warm an entire house...but that means restricting air flow. At some point there's no workable tradeoff that doesn't involve outside sources of power.

That said, you aren't going to get this kind of insulation with blankets and sleeping bags. This involves structural modifications to the dwelling. Which is neither cheap nor possible in a rented living space. And emergency generators seem to run through a lot of fuel in a short period of time...and for the ones I've looked at, the emergency fuel has to be gasoline. So now you need to store barrels of gasoline in your apartment. Whee! And they're noisy, so you can't test it without waking the neighbors. (Sorry, you could test it during the day, and someone would just wonder why you're running a weed whacker in your apartment.)

More seriously, it's possible, it's just totally impractical. And the more you need it, the less practical it is.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[h4rr4r]

If the issue is snow, you melt that and drink it. Yes this means you need to have more fuel. You can crap in the tub if need be.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[Mister Whirly]

Or save that $25/month over a few years and just buy yourself a backup furnace. You honestly pay $300 a year "just in case" there is a catastrophic failure of all 5 of your cell phones? For that matter you could buy a CB, Ham, or Shortwave radio, or various other devices other than a worthless land line that will probably also be out during a SHTF moment. And how many times over say the last 3 1/2 years has that happened to you where your land line was the only thing that could save you? Was it worth over $1000? I am all for being prepared, but $25/month for something that may or may not be of any use during an actual emergency seems silly to me.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[rtaylor]

Emergency sanitation. Frozen pipes. Two weeks. you do the math. And if you're talking "can't open the door because of the snow", don't tell me "just do it outside in the snow".

Can't speak for the rest, but bathtub is a pretty good option for holding lots of waste. When the pipes thaw and water returns, bucket it into the toilet and flush, then wash/clean out the tub. There will not be any insect issues that temperature.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[adisakp]

I wonder how many 911 and 311 calls were dropped during the Chicago Blizzard we just had. Of course, in order to get dropped you would have had to get thru first. I tried calling to report a car accident I saw and I got a busy signal and couldn't get through -- this was on AT&T and it was more than a full 24 hours after the Blizzard.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[GooberToo]

I completely agree. Its really sad the ham operator is going the way of dinosaurs. In the case of emergencies, they have a long and proud history of really pulling through for their communities.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[Lumpy]

From what I have experienced with the complete losers my 19 year old daughter is bringing home as boyfriends. I'll take a 80 year old frail person over a useless 20-23 yr old toothpick pothead wearing skinny jeans and a hoodie.

at least the 80 year old can hold intelligent conversation.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[drinkypoo]

The only major emergency to ever really impact me was the Loma Prieta quake. I lived in Santa Cruz at the time. I kept my land line, but I lived maybe six blocks from the CO.

On the other hand, there's phone lines down right now on Cobb Mountain due to snow-related failures.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[Lumpy]

Death by cold. pipes freeze and burst below 32 deg F. you will die if exposed to 40 degree temperatures for an extended period of time.

Water supply will be just fine and you will be a meat in a refridgerator.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[Lumpy]

"Grandparents are not simply placed on ice floes and pushed out to sea up here. "
Wait, What?

Now to tell me this... Grandma has been adrift on Lake superior for 7 days now.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[Arccot]

This call volume doesn't make sense to me.

It seems pretty high to me, but one thing you should probably include is repeated calls by the same person failing, if the problem was severe in particular areas.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[GooberToo]

I don't know how people lived and worked down here prior to the invention of AC, especially with all the damned clothes they work back then...whew.

Add to that a corset and now you know why women were constantly fainting back then.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[Lumpy]

Most settlers in the USA died the first winter by being stupid and not having enough supplies. Some made it the first winter by eating all their animals after they either died from lack of food (forgot to harvest enough hay for the cow and horses) or because they froze to death because they failed to build a shelter for the animals.

Being stupid is normal for humans... the difference is that modern life has removed the stupid=dead from the equation for most of the population.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[Gordonjcp]

Things like this are one of the main reasons we pay ~$25/mo for a land line

The land lines are the first to go out in high winds or heavy snowfall. During the winter I had extremely unreliable landline service, but no problems at all with my mobile. The problem is that telephone exchanges don't have much backup power, and if the lines themselves fail it doesn't even matter how long the exchange will run for.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[bluefoxlucid]

... yes the world is decaying. :/

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[Mister Whirly]

If you have all of that already, why exactly do you need a land line? Who are you going to call and for what reason?

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be a programmer. But you should still know it's spelled 'queue'. But what you you actually meant was 'cue'.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[Lumpy]

911 is useful for three things.

1 - calling about a home invasion,theft, noisy neighbor.
2 - medical emergency.
3 - structure fire that is too big for you to handle.

Any other use is being lazy. during and after a blizzard because your power is out or you have no heat is NOT a 911 emergency.
Plus, if you can't handle 1 or 2 in a dire emergency on your own... you are very poorly prepared. Know CPR, Know advanced First aid and have a full field guide sized first aid kit. And have a shotgun at home. Yes some medical things like heart attack and stroke or being cut in half cant be fixed with first aid, In those cases during an emergency like a blizzard, I suggest learning last rites and saying goodbye to the person as they die because 911 will not get there in time.

My only solution to the house burning is to run.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[Anonymous Coward]

What the fuck is "Que"? Do you mean "queue", which means a line or to form a line, or "cue" - to prompt or initiate?

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[Lumpy]

even 2 meter will work better than a cellphone and a landline in a real emergency situation.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[Vancorps]

That's funny, because I've camped in double digits negative too, of course the only reason I survived was due to specialized gear to handle that cold. Almost no one would have gear that could handle that although it's unlikely a house would get that cold during an extended period without power. Other posters have said it better, a water supply will be difficult to maintain as it is likely to freeze so the bottom line is that you will need a lot of propane to be prepared and even then you have sanitation issues to deal with.

I grew up in Vermont though, I can't imagine how horrible a storm would have to be to keep us locked up for more than a couple of days. Even during the huge ice storm we had in the 90s no one was stuck in their homes.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[el_gordo101]

The quote from Bloomberg in the headline actually did say Wireless (emphasis mine):

"US regulators said Verizon Communications Inc.'s networks may have dropped a 'truly alarming' number of wireless emergency calls during a snow storm last month, and asked the carrier to investigate."

That said, if you have a land-line with Verizon FIOS, you would also be S.O.L. if the power went out for any length of time as the fiber gear has a battery backup that is only good for about five hours. In fact, I used this to my advantage during one of this winter's storms where we lost power and sought out shelter at my fathers' house. I would call my land-line from my cell and if the call went directly to voice mail, I knew the power was still out. Once I heard the phone ring, I knew the power was back up and running.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[Lumpy]

The dog is a reserve food source.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[0100010001010011]

I always sleep with a window open. Granted I liked a nice warm bed. I grew up in a very old house where my room was the 'insulation' for the living room, meaning my room temp was outside temp +5F at most. During wrestling season when I had an amazing metabolism, if I had a large dinner, I'd sleep with no shirt on with blankets around my waist and be perfectly warm.
My grandma did it till the day she died at 90. There's just something about breathing cold, crisp air while you sleep.

As far as the heat. Drink plenty of water and electrolytes and you'll probably be just fine. Stay in the shade. It'll be uncomfortable but you won't be losing any body parts like you do with frost bite

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[Pollardito]

It looks like you're overstating that quite a bit, from that Wikipedia link you posted:

Inactive telephones

In the U.S., FCC rules require every telephone that can access the network to be able to dial 9-1-1, regardless of any reason that normal service may have been disconnected (including non-payment) (This only applies to states with a Do Not Disconnect policy in place. Those states must provide a "soft" dial tone service, details can be found at http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Common_Carrier/Reports/FCC-State_Link/IAD/pntris99.pdf)

if you read the PDF you see that the states without Do Not Disconnect policies outnumber the ones with them 32 to 18.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[h4rr4r]

My mistake I had thought all states had a Do Not Disconnect policy.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[CastrTroy]

Everybody knows the proper time for living out a zombie infestation is 28 weeks.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[commodore6502]

>>>Living in the Midwest, with significantly less warning time I can tell you that people did their grocery shopping the days before, stayed home from work (either on vacation or closed businesses), and had some kind of secondary heating source available for at least some of their house.
>>>

Midwesterns and Northeasters think differently. People in the MW are used to being "close to the earth" and rearrange their lives to the rhythms and emergencies imposed by Nature.

Northeasters tend to think they should be able to travel anywhere they want, 24 hours a day, even when it's snowing, and blame the government for "failing to plow the roads" when they get stuck.

i.e. We in the NE are spoiled and demanding. Like little kids.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[Anonymous Coward]

They're old, they should have figured shit out by now, if not then oh well.

You, sir, are an asshole.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[h4rr4r]

The pipes often are going to go through areas colder than the home. Heck, I lived for two weeks in a house that probably never got up to 40. Blankets, coats, that sort of stuff helps.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[nanoflower]

It's fine when you are used to it but it is a real shock to the system when you are used to A/C and are suddenly forced to deal with no A/C and high temperatures with high humidity. I grew up with no air conditioning for most of my childhood and never really gave it much thought. There were some days when the heat/humidity became really oppressive (in southern Georgia) but mostly it was fine. At night with the windows open it cooled off enough to be okay and during the day you could have a fan on.

Now I would have trouble dealing with it since I've become so used to having air conditioning. It also doesn't help that I (and just about everyone else) has much more in the way of heat producing devices. TVs/Computers/VCRs/DVRs/cable boxes/etc.. All of that adds to the heat that accumulates in a room.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but they're old and no longer useful. The overall impact is purely aesthetic. I mean I would hate to live in a world where we euthenize the elderly (that includes suddenly denying medical service and "letting nature take over," though I feel what we do now--best effort, but we'll call it faster on an old guy whose heart will probably fail completely in the next 2 days anyway-- is reasonable), but it's not really a huge emergency when lots and lots of old people die in the middle of a snowstorm. They're old, they should have figured shit out by now, if not then oh well.

Agreed. Decrease the surplus population!

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[westlake]

Imagine an elderly person in their home when the heat goes out, in those cold temperatures that can become life threatening very quickly

The elderly and the disabled are least likely to drop the land line.

The cell phone is too small and too easily mislaid. They most likely qualify for the "Lifeline" rate - five dollars or so a month, no more.

The 911 call will go through in any case so long as the line remains disconnected.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[ashidosan]

Almost no one would have gear that could handle that

It's called "layered clothing" and I've done the same thing in Montana with no "specialized" gear other than a windbreaker (and many layers underneath).

Not recommending against the gear, but people did manage to survive before North Face and Columbia brand clothing.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[tilandal]

911 Calls are toll free. You don't need to pay for local service to use 911. As long as your house is wired for phone service you can plug in a phone and dial 911. Just make sure you use a old dumb phone. Its great when your cordless phone doesn't work if the power is out :P

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[jittles]

You don't have to pay for phone service to use 911. As long as you're connected to the network, you can just plug in a phone and dial 911 and it works. Of course the $25 a month does help pay for maintenance.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[Belial6]

This thread made me do a mental note about how much food I have in the house. (In CA I don't really have to worry about being snowed in.) And that lead me to think about just how much a pain in the ass eating must be for people that don't have 3 days of food in the house. How do you even do that? Even if these people eat every piece of food in the house before going to the store the next time, they would have to be shopping 2-3 times a week. That must be an enormous burden on these people. Heck, a bottle of ketchup and some water, and you have 3 or 4 meals in a life or death situation.

It seems that you would have to go out of your way to get your house down to 3 days worth of food.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[HiThere]

Well, in the "urban emergency" training I took, the item they stressed most highly was triage. Don't try to help someone who might not recover, but might live through it. You risk being sued. Help the people who can make a sufficiently complete recovery. Comfort those who aren't going to make it without professional help. And avoid the in-between. You aren't a medic.

Now extrapolate from that. (I put a more cynical slant on it than the class did, but I don't think I've changed the facts.)

Survivalists appear to me to fall into the "avoid these characters" category. Doesn't mean that it's a bad idea to have food and water, but if there's a real breakdown of water supplies...then what you really need to worry about is fire. You can live a day or two without water, and you'd better expect to need to. Some idiot is going to start a fire to keep warm, and not properly control it. And a proper fire break means cutting down the neighbors trees. He's not likely to allow THAT. Or in built-up areas it might mean demolishing the buildings around you. (OTOH, skyscrapers *are* less inflamable.)

Then there's medications. If you are dependent on medications, you'll have noticed that you can't buy a supply ahead. You're only supposed to order them as they are used.

The lack of ability to respond to emergencies is a structural feature of our society. The society claims the right to protect us, and acts to discourage attempts to not be required. I doubt that any particular person made those decisions. They made essentially random decisions (in a constrained fashion) and the ones that happened to promote social cohesion were retained. Being dependent on society for support is such a factor. (I'm not saying that the wealthy, powerful, or energetic can't overcome these decision. They aren't usually intentional designs, so they don't offend anyone if you go against them. They just create a constant pressure.)

Another thing worthy of note: I live in the SF Bay area. Immediately after the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989 lots of stores sprang up retailing earthquake survival supplies. I think one of them is still in business. In Marin County, a notably wealthy and predominately non-urban area. People are reluctant to prepare for "rare events". Especially in any way that involves continued effort. E.g., my wife worries a great deal about disasters, and in fact was the one who dragged me to the training. But I can't get her to invest in a "Emergency survival kit". She has a list of "things we need to do to prepare for an emergency", but they aren't getting done. The easy way to handle many of the items on the list would be to buy a survival kit. But it's a bit expensive, and she worries that the food contains too much salt. (It's freeze dried, so of course it's a lot salt by weight.)

Then there's storage. Where can you store things that they'll be available in an emergency, and where they won't be stolen before hand? Our lot isn't that big, and access to much of it is likely to be restricted if there's an earthquake. Which leaves areas visible from the street. (Even that's problematical.)

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[jarlsberg71]

I've had vonage for 5 years now. It's great, and the simplest UPS can actually power the cable modem, my router, and the vonage modem for HOURS with the power out (last time I checked was 6+ hours) Yes the beeping sucks, but it silences after a while. My laptop ran out of juice way before my network died.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[natehoy]

I had Vonage for a while, and since I had a decent UPS I found that it was pretty reliable at least as long as the UPS lasted. Until Comcast took over and stopped swapping out the batteries in their substations, of course. Now, whenever the power blinks, I lose Internet access for at least an hour. I've used my Vonage line when the landlines were out, I've used my cell when both the landline and Vonage were out, and I've used a landline when both Vonage and my cell were out. I honestly haven't found one of them that works ALL the time. So I have a VoIP line and a cell, and a couple of my neighbors have landlines. Between us, we can call for help if we need it.

As far as the volume of 911 calls...

But I've also never had to call 911 for something like a power outage. I mean, really? What are the police going to do? Bring you a blankie? If you're young and fit, stay off the damned phone. If you don't have some spare food and water, stop by on your way home tonight and pick up a few gallons of cheap potable water and a case of soup so you don't have to call the WAAAAAAAAmbulance if the power goes out for a day or two. It'll cost you about ten bucks, and might make the next power outage a lot more comfortable. Cold soup's no fun to eat, but it's safe and chock full of calories.

If you want to take this half-seriously, a handful of cans of good hearty soup, some meat in the freezer, a couple of loaves of bread, a propane grill with a side burner and a spare tank or two, 4-5 gallons of water per person (rotate through it or dump-and-fill every few months), a couple of half-assed first aid kits, and there's really nothing anyone else needs to do for you unless you injure yourself. Hell, if you're lucky enough not to have to go to work for a few days, live it up! BBQ every night! Woohoo! Don't forget a couple of cases of decent beer.

More importantly, check in on your elderly neighbors with the occasional dose of warm high-calorie food and thermos of tea so they don't HAVE to call 911! Bring a good sleeping bag and a couple of Nalgenes of boiling water wrapped in a towel in case you need to warm them up fast. Get them in the sleeping bag and put the Nalgenes (still wrapped in the towels) in with them. Chances are, if they're chilled, their bodies are incapable of generating enough warmth, so bring some with you.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[_0xd0ad]

just how much a pain in the ass eating must be for people that don't have 3 days of food in the house. How do you even do that? ... they would have to be shopping 2-3 times a week.

Shopping? Does that include stopping by McD's to order carry-out? What about having Pizza Hut deliver?

That must be an enormous burden on these people.

Was that a fat joke?

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[Belial6]

If they are counting redials, then they are faking the numbers. Just as counting every time I flip a light switch as a separate power outage would be faked numbers.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[natehoy]

You suspect correctly. If you can reach a tower, you can make a 911 call. No plan (hell, no SIM) required.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[Anonymous Coward]

All you need to get by is a gun and a sucker that stocked up on supplies.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[Anonymous Coward]

Bill, Sorry to be rude but, your grammar and/or spelling is/are atrocious. Please change your username to something other than Bill_the_Engineer, you are embarrassing real engineers. If English is not your primary language, perhaps you could make that clarification in your sig or as part of your username (Eg Bill_theBangladeshi_Engineer)? Were you stoned/drunk/dry when you wrote the above post? Please submit the appropriate explanation for a less-than-impressive effort.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[pnuema]

I take Boy Scouts to summer camp every year in Missouri - 90+ degrees, 80+ humidity the entire time. After about 4 days you get used to the heat again; it's not nearly as bad as the first couple of days.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[h4rr4r]

Please remember parts of our country are north of parts of yours. Please also remember that for some of us 32F is a tropical day in the winter. 32F would be a big improvement over the temp right now for me.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[kryliss]

When I worked for the helpdesk I would always love the customers that would get Vonage and then think that they didn't need their phone line any more... the same phone line that would carry their DSL connection... soooooooo they would cancel their phone service and the DSL went with it. Yes, these are the people that we'd either eat first or throw to the zombies as fodder.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[_0xd0ad]

Engineers tend to be notoriously bad at writing. If you were really an engineer, Anonymous Coward, I suspect you would know that.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[petgiraffe]

I've seen land lines go out. Tree or car hits pole, lightning strikes lines, or, with new fiber land lines, power goes out and battery backup dies.

But yeah, I agree they don't go out as often as power goes out.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[ElectricTurtle]

They aren't usually intentional designs, so they don't offend anyone if you go against them.

An amusing thing to say after saying yourself 'Survivalists appear to me to fall into the "avoid these characters" category.' If you do everything reasonable to prepare yourself for a disaster, chances are all those others willing to trust an external response are going to label you a 'survivalist' and assume you're paranoid with delusions of grandeur.

[...] and she worries that the food contains too much salt.

Salty food is preferable to no food. Unless one of you has a medical condition like high blood pressure where too much salt could be a real danger, this sounds like a weak excuse to keep procrastinating.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[Anonymous Coward]

911 is useful for three things.

1 - calling about a home invasion,theft, noisy neighbor.

You consider "noisy neighbor" to be an emergency situation?

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[Anonymous Coward]

In general, many people have become soft thanks to modern life.

"911? I need a snuggie, now!"

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[natehoy]

Wow. I only pay $10 for unlimited, while my parents have $5 per-call billing (they don't call out much). You may be paying more than you need to.

Here in Maine, the "unlimited local" package is $31, which includes local-only calling. I think I've heard of a per-call (though it's not on their web site any more) at about $20. All of that is before taxes, of course, which are good for another $5-10. For that kind of money, I can get a 450-minute plan from AT&T or Verizon and buy a cheap cell for $40 so I don't need to sign up for a contract commitment to get it.

I have an old analog phone from 1999. You think that would still call 911?

No, but that's because they won't be able to reach a tower. I don't think many analog towers even exist any more.

However, you can drop by Best Buy and pick up a GoPhone for about $10, then just never activate the card in it. Instant 911-only cell phone, $10.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[sjames]

Yes, because frail elderly women are well known for their uncanny ability to shovel masses of snow so they can cook outside on a Coleman stove. Some people try cooking inside with a fuel stove when the power fails. That is one of the things that leads to 911 calls.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[natehoy]

For various values of "inactive".

I have landline wires coming to my house, but they haven't been used in over a decade, probably closer to 15 years.

Somewhere along the line, the phone company shut off the dialtone.

But you are correct that any line that has a dialtone also has the capability to call 911. And, usually, the telephone company's customer service line (I've activated a couple of landlines that way - pick up the phone at the place I'm moving into, dial the customer service number, and quite often the rep will answer "hello, are you calling to set up service at your new place?"). $75 and 15 minutes later, I had a landline.

I learned it was a lot cheaper to just take my cell phone out of my pocket and yell "I DUB THEE MY HOME PHONE!" whenever I moved.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting anonymously as I actually work in the E911 industry and have some insight on 911 calls in general..

Most people don't realize this but most 911 call centers (PSAPs or Public Safety Answering Point) only have at MOST 15 wireless trunks and 30 landline trunks. Those are the HUGE regional response centers that handle calls from multiple counties/cities and there are only a few PSAPs that are this large in the country. Most PSAPs have fewer than 15 trunks in total and of those maybe 5 are wireless trunks. In the case of a widespread natural disaster, it doesn't matter if you have a landline or wireless, there simply aren't enough lines going into that location to handle all of the calls. If you get through to emergency responders then you are lucky.

Think of it like this, it is a DDOS perpetrated by significant weather events. This investigation is well and good, but all they are going to discover is that you can't build enough infrastructure affordably to handle the traffic in an event like this. on-demand availability won't solve it either because you are still personnel limited at the other end.

Bottom line, if you are relying on the government for your safety you are deluded into thinking they can really do anything in the immediate timeframe following a natural disaster. Your best bet is to be prepared to fend for yourself for at least 48 hours, preferably 7 days.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[_0xd0ad]

The easy way to handle many of the items on the list would be to buy a survival kit. But it's a bit expensive, and she worries that the food contains too much salt.

There's a hidden benefit... ask her if she'd rather piss a lot of valuable water down the drain.

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[treeves]

"... I'd sleep with no shirt on with blankets around my waist and be perfectly warm.
My grandma did it till the day she died at 90."

Thanks, but I don't want to try to picture that.

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[kryliss]

Beer is actually a very good idea. Beer is brewed and thus is "clean" to drink. Plus it's good for a long time. Just pop a few into a snow bank when you're ready to drink them unless you would rather drink them warm.

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[afidel]

My car battery can keep a cellphone going for weeks without even affecting its ability to cold start the car, and if it starts to get a bit low I can just start the car up and run it for an hour to return it to full charge.

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[_0xd0ad]

While the water in beer actually does hydrate you, it's still really not that great a choice for hydration since the alcohol, you know, makes you piss. Same goes for caffeinated beverages (coffee, soft drinks, and some teas).

In fact, if you're trying to conserve water, it's probably a good idea as much as possible to just avoid anything that would unduly tax your kidneys (including over-the-counter painkillers).

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[sjames]

Simple preparedness seems to be much more ingrained in the culture of the Midwest than in the D.C. area.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah. Test it indoors. That will work. And there are propane generators. LPG stores forever unlike gasoline. And to the parent of your post, fitting two weeks of food and water into a studio apartment? Are you kidding me? I could fit it in the trunk of a small car, including the fuel to melt the water and maybe even cook. Better yet, trade water for fuel and drink all that snow.

If you live in an area where life is that tough for whatever reason (cold and snow in this case) and can't survive for a few fucking days off the grid you've just failed the most basic test of life, and it's time to die.

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[afidel]

My coworker had a tree snap the pole in front of his house and the messed up voltage caused a power strip at his neighbors to ignite, fire department and electric company were dispatched just fine despite it being the middle of a massive ice storm and blizzard. That's a good enough reason to keep a land line around IMHO. Of course for me it's VoIP and my cable modem, router, and TA are all on UPS plus we have two cell phones, the landline is mostly for when neither my wife or I are home (rare but it does happen).

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[Lord Ender]

You pay $300 per year to hedge against the scenario in which TWO cell phone networks go down at the same time, while nobody is nearby who can help you, while you are somehow prevented of contacting neighbors, while you can't get in your car and drive for help, while you immediately need 911 help, but yet while you are still capable of getting to and operating a wall-mounted phone. All of these things must happen simultaneously for your $300 bet to pay off in a given year.

You must have a peculiar approach to risk management. Might I interest you in purchasing a reinforced seat belt for your car? I'll install it for only $50k. There is a negligibly small chance that it will hold when your regular seatbelt won't, you know.

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[natehoy]

Agreed, but if you're talking about a well-prepared person that has a water reserve, might as well turn that power outage into an excuse to live it up a little. :)

Unfortunately, whether the power is on at the house or not, the Diesel generators at work still ensure that I gotta drag my carcass into work. So the power outage is just a hassle - it means I get home to a cold, dark house with a wife and daughter who are very unhappy about the house being cold and dark. Not "let's go out and spend $2,500 for a generator" unhappy, but unhappy nonetheless.

The same is generally true of snow. I just gotta get up early to plow my 1/4 mile driveway when we get a foot or two, it's not an excuse to stay home.

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[Chewbacon]

Off topic, but just adding to the thought of air conditioning. I live in Florida. When I was renting apartments, I would always scratch my head at what was considered an emergency in climate control. If my heater broke, maintenance would have to come fix it any time of day. Mind you, there's maybe 10 days total of freezing weather here. However, if the AC unit went out on a 110 degree Sunday in August, I'd have to wait until the next day for service.

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[BJ_Covert_Action]

You might just want to suggest to your daughter that she up her standards. I've met my fair share of stupid 19 year olds (hell, 6 years ago I used to be one), but make no mistake, there are quite a few intelligent and literate ones out there as well. As a general rule of thumb, guys that are working hard towards something (difficult college major, promising career path, etc.) tend to be less likely to smoke themselves stupid and dress like a main character from 8 Mile. Of course, there are exceptions to every rule.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[rubycodez]

Real engineers have to write well to produce estimates, proposals, specifications, scopes, ISO policies, test procedures, manuals and training materials.

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[rubycodez]

You'll find that most "preppers" tend to be *heavily* armed against punks who think as you do.

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[ShaunC]

Things like this are one of the main reasons we pay ~$25/mo for a land line despite having 5 active cell phones in the house on 2 separate networks (not to mention a few inactive ones that can still call 911)

It's my understanding that inactive landlines can still call 911, too. Unless you're using it for anything else, you probably don't need to pay for the dial tone. YMMV, check your local provider, etc.

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[ortholattice]

Yes, but they're old and no longer useful. The overall impact is purely aesthetic....it's not really a huge emergency when lots and lots of old people die in the middle of a snowstorm..

I, on the other hand, think the world would be better off without those who are congenitally devoid of empathy (please look up the word, although it may be hard for someone without it to grasp its meaning).

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[raitchison]

Far from the only reason, but the reliability of a land line is nothing to discount. We use our land line primarily for local calls, it provides better call quality and allows us to cost effectively place phones in every room of the house where we might be.

If we ditched our land line we would need to upgrade our cell plan to one with more minutes so much if not all of the savings of cutting the land line is going to disappear.

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[Duradin]

It's the winter kill. Takes care of a lot of the people who can't be bothered about the weather.

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[_0xd0ad]

Oh yeah... I've sure heard that one before.

I've also read estimates, proposals, specifications, scopes...

They may have contained all of the necessary information, but "well written" isn't how I'd describe most of them.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[Lord Ender]

VOIP services are $11 per month and are unlimited, with more features than a landline. The only reason to have a landline these days is because you want the negligibly-lower downtime and because you want to pay more.

Actually, where I live, you can't even get landlines now. The phone company only offers VOIP, and the copper has been replaced with fiber.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[Anonymous Coward]

I certainly agree with you on the softening of the human race! the good of mankind depends on these events to kill off the weak.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[Anonymous Coward]

Ditto here. Power out, phone out, cell worked. At least until the towers lost power, too, but by then I'd already made arrangements to get my road plowed so I could get out and restock after the power company took nearly 2 weeks to get everybody back up.

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[Bill_the_Engineer]

While I do appreciate you coming to my defense, engineers in general know how to write. Believe it or not so do I.

I just spend considerably less time proofing my writing prior to hitting submit on slashdot than I do when I'm working. I don't take AC trolls too seriously, so if my misplacing an ' that changes a possessive "its" into a contraction meaning "it is", or my incorrect usage of 'is' instead of 'are' when talking about the elderly as a group sends him off the deep end then he has bigger issues than my writing skills.

I suspect he is overly sensitive about the outsourcing of engineers and he lashed out because he mistook my inattentive posting as "english as a second language".

Thanks again _0xd0ad.

Short version for the AC troll: It's slashdot. Who gives a shit?

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[Unkyjar]

If I had mod points. You're the first person to point out the problems from the call center's point in a disaster that would definitely skew the statistics.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[Anonymous Coward]

I have four "inactive" land lines in my house and not a one has a dial-tone.

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[lgw]

When you're poor, moving is just driving. When you have no job skills, one Walmart is much like another to work for. The real problem is: when you lack any ability to plan, or have just stopped caring about the furute, you're pretty much screwed in any case.

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[jareth-0205]

I lived for two weeks in the buffalo winter without heat when i first moved in. With some blankets and a sleeping bag you can do fine.

*You* are not *other people*, who are old, or have medical conditions, or perhaps are just different to you. Try to use your tiny imagination just a little before making overarching judgemental generalisations.

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[icebike]

Seriously, 10,000 911 calls is a huge number, even if 911 is being abused there were no doubt a lot of calls from people trapped in their homes (for people who have ditched their landlines) or cars.

Yes, a huge number. But the story doesn't indicate any source for that number.

Do they have pen data for that? Do they have calls that arrived, were answered, and then disconnected?
And were they able to trace each of these numbers to verizon phones?

Or did they count 10k abandoned (oddly parked) cars and assume they all had Verizon?

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[flappinbooger]

How many elderly people do you think have cell phone only?

Probably a number very close to zero. My parents are ~70 years old, fairly tech savvy - my dad is a retired electrical engineer. They have JUST started getting into the habit of actually taking the cell phone WITH them and turning it ON. I don't think they will ever get rid of their landline.

Anyone in danger of "I've fallen and I can't get up" will most likely have a POTS. My wife and I have not had a landline since 2003 and we probably never will again. We have, however, got a prepaid cell for our kids to learn on. Not having a POTS in the house, and not wanting a kid to call Bangladesh from our cells, has made it an interesting challenge to get them used to using a phone.

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[HiThere]

Good point about testing it indoors, but that's where you would need to run it, so you'd better have that angle covered.
I didn't go there, because:
1) I don't currently live in an apartment, and
2) The idea of storing a barrel of gasoline near my living quarters didn't thrill me.

Propane would definitely be a better answer, but my search didn't turn up any. (I found this quite surprising, and it sounds like I should have found something else. But the rate of fuel consumption was such that I pretty much stopped looking.)

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[HiThere]

I'm not going to be able to convince her on this point. I need to find something that's labeled "no salt added". But the emergency kits contain a lot more useful stuff than just food. But she gets hung up on the salt. (Yeah, we both have high blood pressure, and she grew up with a heart problem. But it's still an unreasonable set of priorities. That aren't going to be changed.)

P.S.: To the other poster:
A survivalist isn't someone who prepares for a disaster, it's someone who obsesses about it. Sometimes to the point of saying "If you weren't prepared, then you deserve to die."

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[Belial6]

Honestly, I eat out WAY more than what is reasonable, and I still don't get how you can have less than 3 days worth of food. You would almost have to commit to ONLY eating out. I know that there are people like that, but surely the number of people who ONLY eat out is a very small number...

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[Anonymous Coward]

I'd sleep with no shirt on with blankets around my waist and be perfectly warm.

My grandma did it till the day she died at 90.

I read this, paused, re-read it, just to be sure... reflected for a few minutes... and morbid curiosity very nearly prompted me to ask how you knew this to be true... until I realized that any answer would almost certainly fall into the category of "TMI".

However, I must ask: Where did you say you grew up? I want to be sure that I never go within a thousand miles of there, if at all possible.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not, nor are the engineers I work with, perhaps at Lockmart they are notoriously bad at writing? The ones I work with tend to be bad at public speaking and mostly dress not too stylishly, but generally they're good with grammar and spelling. I posted AC cause I was afraid I'd make a grammar or spelling mistake while correcting some loser on his... True cowardice; however, real engineer.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[Anonymous Coward]

Very few of your arguments apply to land lines exclusively and seem to be aimed more at redundancy, yet you seem to be pushing land lines as the end all cost effective solution. They are not.

"And as an aside, my phone line costs $14/mo."

Where I was, phone for the first line with taxes were $20 a month, and that was 8 years ago. I've heard that they've gone up even more since then. Also, in the age of credit reports, if you are late, you pay more than that in the long haul. So that's $240 a year plus the phone company being a dick. By dick, I mean you go online 3 days in a row to pay your bill, their accounts website is offline, and they mark you as a late payer and report it. So the next time go for a loan, you get jacked. btw, that was done by, yes, you guessed it, Verizon.

And yes, I put part of the responsibility on Verizon, given they choose to participate and advocated before Congress got involved the whole credit monitoring sham. Verizon also has HUGE cause to drop 911 calls deliberately; one of their execs was quote in a story on /. a few years ago saying that cell phones are not supposed to replace landlines, complaining how they were losing a huge amount of revenue from people abandoning landlines.

"I[n] every major emergency I've been in, either wireless went down or was so beyond capacity it was impossible to place a call."

The wireless service YOU HAD went down. There were plenty of wireless options that probably didn't. Not all of them are relevant, but SPOT didn't. Other, more reliable versions of SPOT probably didn't either (like the $400 hiker frequency ones; SPOT is around $100 a year). Satellite internet probably didn't go out either, including sat phones, but they cost more, but they also have multiple uses. Amateur radio and radio frequencies like FRS didn't either probably although the latter is near impossible communicate with if you need to be routed.

I've been in more situations where the hardwires go down first before wireless does. Wires dragged down by ice. Trees or branches knocked over by wind taking out a slew of branches. Lightning once. A squirrel or something another. And in 4 cases, vehicles driving that slid off the road, rammed the telephone pole, and snapped wires. I've heard of people not being able to call out because their phone used external power (for an answering machine, other features) and the power went out, they couldn't place a call (they didn't know this and didn't think of it prior).

btw, the last time the pole was hit 3 years ago, to this day, it still hasn't been replaced or repaired, despite 2 calls to the electric and telephone company (phone company is responsible for this particular pole). The stabilizing wire sits next to the street plain as day as the electric company and phone trucks travel by (I'm 1 mile from 1 of the 2 main roads PP&L rolls out from for the county, and near a CO and a service location for Verizon landlines).

"Attempting to argue against it is dumb."

So you have the wealth and resources to not only be prepared, but have multiple options. Reality check punk--not everyone does. If they have a choice between a cell and a landline, most will pick a cell because it gives them both the option to use it at home and on the road. People typically spend something like 1/3rd of their lives being transported in some way. The cell phone is more than likely to come in handy. Also a good number of those people were probably stranded in their cars, so landlines are hardly going to help.

Be prepared costs a shitload. $250 a year is nothing to sneeze at. Backup heaters, generators, fuel, food, comforters, add it up sometime. That's a lot of bread for the average person.

Not to mention, you can get cell phones these days without much fear of your credit being bombed out, which is why people use pay as they go plans--to save money, to avoid credit checks, and because the credit system makes them unable to get regular plan.

"are not going to

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[witherstaff]

Matters where you live but in my corner of Michigan (GTE, then verizon, just sold to frontier) tone is a $5 additional charge on the landline. It may have changed in the last 2 years when I dropped the line but I doubt it. I took great pleasure in hearing the pulse since that meant they had to specially program my line to work with the new equipment. When I ran an ISP I made sure to tell every customer about that. It didn't hurt the dialup speeds but did save customers a few bucks and cost the phone company more.

In the rural area it was not uncommon for lines to go down. Bad weather, hitting the greentree phone boxes, farming or construction digging into the telco lines.

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[losfromla]

well Bill_the_poor_atSpelling_Engineer (maybe I'll change my username to that in your honor), apparently I give a shit, even on slashdot. We have to have standards you see, if we all start putting out shit, how long till we've devolved to ebonics or some pidgin variant. I'm pretty sure I didn't go off the deep end, I didn't throw out any all-caps or expletives, did I? I am pretty sensitive to the outsourcing although thankfully, as a general principle and not from having been directly impacted by it (didn't lose my job to a Bangladeshi). Please be more attentive in the future so as to not detract from otherwise valuable contributions.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[mariasama16]

However, nothing in the article mentions anything about power going out, let alone natural gas lines that could also power furnaces. Just that 10k people called 911 during a snowstorm and Verizon's network couldn't handle it. However, could the 911 network have handled that many people calling in?

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[gmhowell]

That's a rather modest proposal.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[haruchai]

As someone who's very used to temp extremes, I can tell you that, if your friend can go barefoot in snow, he must have exceptionally good circulation to his extremities. That's innate, although I suppose acclimation from childhood is possible. I highly doubt that an adult could make the same adjustment

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[notgm]

i have seen statistics for similar events in the past. when 911 offices are at capacity, and people can't get through, it's a send-end-send-end scenario...people don't give up, and one call turns into ten calls turns into 50 calls.

the call volume doesn't make sense to you because not all the facts are presented.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[formfeed]

Why is 2 weeks the magic number?

2 weeks is of course the length of time a zombie can last without eating brains.

Not if they have blankets, I just read somewhere that even a widow could last that long if she had blankets.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[evilviper]

You honestly think you can store all of that in a studio apartment?

You aren't going to have a family of 4 in a studio apartment, so YES. Studio apartments have closets, lots of shelf space, etc. And if they don't have enough, put up your own. Unless you're 10' tall, you probably don't need that open ceiling space. And how often do you stand up on your desk or bed? Room for more shelves. Ask any New Yorker... You can squeeze a hell of a lot more than you ever thought possible, into a tiny amount of space.

I'll concede that studio apartment life is miserable, but you can definitely squeeze a hell of a lot in if you can't afford anything better. The big drawback with any lack of space is that it's several times more work to do anything... You're constantly painting yourself into a corner, so to speak, and have to go through everything in reverse, repeatedly, to get your walkways back.

A 2 week supply of water.

Even studio apartments have water heaters. That's a pretty big tank of water you can draw from. And as an added bonus, all the fools with a tankless unit take the Darwinian way out.

You'll be a sad panda when you find your 5 gallon buckets are 5 gallon blocks of ice.

Not a pleasant thought, but your water needs are greatly reduced by cold weather, so as long as you aren't already dying of hypothermia, you'll be able to melt enough to get what you need.

And if you're talking "can't open the door because of the snow", don't tell me "just do it outside in the snow".

Ok. If you've got a 10' snow drift against your door, do it INSIDE, in the snow. Open door or window, dig out a nice round hole, insert waste, close window.

Your own home.

Actually, the compact apartment is not just survivable, but beneficial. Your body (and any thing else still generating heat) can do a lot more in 500 square feet than it can in 2,000. All the stuff stacked against every open wall and blocking the windows becomes added insulation. Sure, you can close up one room in your house, but it almost certainly doesn't have insulation in interior walls, while a studio apartment is insulated all around.

even with the best of insulation. It takes a lot of calories to do that kind of thing, and you have to be able to USE those calories, which an old person may well not be acclimatized to.

People forget what calories are. They are, rather literally, a measure of how much heat a piece of food will put out when it is burned.

If worse comes to worse, burning small amounts of material indoors can generate the heat you need to stay alive. You should, of course, ventilate the building so all the oxygen isn't sucked out of the room. When it's actually a matter of survival, rather than how comfortable you are in the bad days, there's plenty of desperate options available to you.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[Anonymous Coward]

"The rest did happen but is hyperbole"
Did it happen or is it hyperbole? Also, just because fleeing is the smart thing to do doesn't change the fact that EMERGENCY SERVICES STILL CAN'T HELP YOU. If I'm having a heart attack it doesn't really matter WHY the ambulance can't get to me. The only thing that matters is that I'm fucked.

As for informing your loved ones, etc. two things:
1) Calling people to tell them that you are OK is fucking stupid. You're taking up time on a cell tower, or land line, or whatever that could be better used allowing people to coordinate rescue efforts, etc. You know, actually doing something useful. Your loved ones can sit praying and worrying for another 48 hours if it will help save someone's life.
2) Text messages generally work OK. They queue up and get sent out over time. Assuming that you're just saying "I'm OK, will call when the phones aren't being used by rescue workers" and not telling them your life story this will work fine.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[timeOday]

Dude, you are flirting with disaster, I heard Hugh Hefner reads slashdot religiously and he does not date in his own age bracket.

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[Walkingshark]

Yeah but how do you handle the smell when you cut them open?

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[russotto]

I've also read estimates, proposals, specifications, scopes...

They may have contained all of the necessary information,

Clearly you have NOT read estimates, proposals, specifications, scopes...

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[sunspot42]

>When you're poor, moving is just driving.

Moving involves deposits (utilities, apartment), the rental of a moving van, fuel, insurance . . . That's a whole bunch of money for folks who don't have any.

And try getting a job without an address. It's not easy - especially in this economy.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[EdIII]

You don't need to be spending $25 on a land line. Their greater reliability is a myth.

The way a land line telephone stays on during a power outage is the 48v that is being supplied by the telco side, usually referred to as the Central.Office. That is has emergency power supplied by batteries just like a cell phone tower. What gets people too is that when the power goes out they can't run those fancy wireless sets either. You need a $10 wired phone from Radio Shack. Those will only use the 48v from the telco to operate. No additional power required.

What happens when the batteries run out at your CO? All the land lines go down too.

So it really is just a pick two situation if you want some redundancy.

1) Internet.
2) Cell phone.
3) Land line telephone.
4) Wireless Internet.

All of those have battery back ups. What *you* need to have is a generator or battery back ups at your own house. *Both* sides have power. I have spent plenty of nights with my whole house in the dark, but still on the Internet because I had battery backups for the cablemodem/dsl modem and the router. Laptop with extra batteries and I am good to go.

You can get cheap VOIP service with unlimited incoming and ~1c outgoing (be careful about the arbitrage to rural areas) WITH e911 service. I have it and can easily place 911 calls through my VOIP provider. I have tested it too, because you are allowed to follow a specific script calling 911 where you ask them ahead of time that this is a service test and if they have the time to participate in the test. I was transferred to the correct PSAP for my area and they confirmed the correct address.

My VOIP service is $5 per month. That's it.

So with battery backups you can keep your Internet access maintained and the ability to call 911. All of those options are equal in their ability to call 911, and their ability to operate off battery backups, and roughly comparable in the amount of time the backups operate.

That means you can compare them and pick two.

Internet - You already got it (you're on /.) so why not add to its capabilities?
Cellular - You already got it. Keep it as an option for 911 too.
Wireless Internet - You may or may not have it. It can be more cost effective in some places with 4G to have wireless internet exclusively. Latency on 4G is suitable for VOIP. I have tested it, and you can carry on a conversation. Not an optimum solution, but your 911 call will go through.
Land Line - Expensive. Limited. Obsolete. Only makes phones calls. Phone calls usually much higher than 1c per minute.

If you ask me, keeping a land line for $25 per month just to have multiple options to place 911 calls and communicate is an inefficient use of your resources. You can get the same level of reliability cheaper with more features and kill two birds with one stone.

Your other concern basically boils down to bandwidth usage at any one time. Pick two options from the top and you still raise your chances of communicating through a network that has the bandwidth to support the increased traffic during an emergency. Something else to consider is that during a blizzard and a power outage it will be far less likely that everyone will be using the ISPs bandwidth at the same time. Your odds of communicating through the Internet are probably better.

As long you are bringing up communicating with the relatives as being an important objective, the Internet accomplishes this with VOIP, Skype, Email, and Social Networking like Facebook all at the same time. Does a land line telephone do that?

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[NateTech]

His point was that when you're calling out for help, you're in a very long line of people waiting for that help. I listen to police scanners and hear my city run out of Ambulances on busy nights in GOOD conditions. You think anyone's coming in the really bad conditions that would trigger a need for that land-line to call 911?

Calling loved ones isn't going to happen if they're outside of the affected area. Trunks will be full. No telephone carrier budgets or builds out to handle massive amounts of in or outbound calls in an area. There's a few special systems set up for high-level emergency responders to over-ride regular calls on the cellular side of things now, but most areas haven't paid for it for any but the very highest officials.

Communications is always the first thing to break down in a disaster scenario. Either due to sheer overload, or due to massive power outages that last longer than the backup systems can operate.

No phone line is going to work adequately, land-line or cellular-based for the "last mile" once you hit the log-jam of fast-busy and "all circuits busy" switch messages at the Inter-Machine Trunks. And no one local is going to be capable of responding to your call to 911 unless you get lottery-level lucky.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[NateTech]

Wow, you've just described the problem with most of the Federal Government run from... the D.C. area.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[NateTech]

They make cordless phone base units that pair with cell phones over bluetooth these days, if you're trying to put a "phone in every room". They also make similar boxes that pair to the cell phone(s) over bluetooth and feed out a standard phone line, that can be used to back-feed the house to as many phones as the little box's ring voltage generator can drive.

The main reason these days to have a real land-line is call audio quality, since it's not stuffed through a 18Kb/s CODEC or less. Cell phone calls sound like crap.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[NateTech]

Most CO's have days worth of diesel and generators on hand to keep the -48VDC battery plant charged up. In many States, they're required to by the regulators. Check yours. No the generators won't always start up, or might blow a coolant loop or something, but the original Bell COs were into engineering in "five 9s" and "six 9s" uptime twenty to thirty years before anyone revived the terminology of telco in data center marketing slicks.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[Anonymous Coward]

Phone lines are used to established contact with the outside world. Sometimes its used to get help. Other times its used to assure loved ones you're okay.

If there's a wide spread disaster or emergency, quit tying up the phone lines and bandwidth just so you can call your mom for the 12th time in 2 hours. One call to say I'm ok, sure I can see that but keep it under a minute. Letting them know you are OK is nowhere nearly as important as someone else letting the hospital know that they are NOT ok.

Which is smarter? Leaving emergency crews and equipment to be destroyed and killed, effectively ensuring no assistance is available to anyone.

Well your point about what they did is indeed valid. But it counters your stance vs. the parent. His point was that there's a pretty good chance the emergency crews won't be able to help you on an individual basis even if you CAN contact them.

candles, blankets, etc., are not going to get you medical care, fire assistance, police, or let your loved ones know you're okay. With your supplies, I'll safely see that I'm warm while I die.

Which is why your supplies should include medical supplies, something to deal with fire (or survive if you have to move into the open), a weapon when the police can't assist you, and a PRE-ARRANGED plan of action with your loved ones.

Some of what you said makes sense. Lots of what you said doesn't. Worse, some of what you said is nothing but ignorance.

No, everything he said in relation to survival is pretty good. Anything he was wrong or ignorant about has no bearing on the story, as you yourself mentioned already.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[Anonymous Coward]

Landlines have very stringent QoS and uptime requirements

Bullshit. QoS doesn't even figure into it, for starters. Second, they can count a landline as being "Up" as long as the call will connect to a 911 operator, even if the quality is so poor that neither of you can understand the other.

But you're missing the point entirely. If 10K people dial 911, even if you ALL get through most of you won't see emergency workers for days. In the storm in the story, landlines were down for upwards of a week in areas when cell service had been restored within hours.

There's give and take with both technologies. As long as you're aware of the limitations of each, and take the appropriate actions you'll be as well off as you can be. But that's the REAL problem- nobody was really prepared, which is why there were that many calls to start with.
Oh, and on top of that you have all these insecure dipshits who think that calling their mom every 1/2 hour is important. Well guess what, you only need one phone call to say "I'm OK" and it takes about 30 seconds. Then hang up, in case someone needs to call 911 to tell someone they are NOT ok.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[_0xd0ad]

I'm not going to be able to convince her on this point. I need to find something that's labeled "no salt added".

Salt is a preservative, and survival kits need to last a while. So ... good luck with that.

High blood pressure is one of the body's coping mechanisms, like a fever. Not good for extended periods of time - like all the time - but in a disaster, it shouldn't be one of your primary concerns unless it's really dangerously high.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[drinkypoo]

When you're poor, moving is just driving.

You mean, when you're homeless but still have a car?

The real problem is: when you lack any ability to plan, or have just stopped caring about the furute, you're pretty much screwed in any case.

Man, fuck the furute.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[bluefoxlucid]

The world would be better off without people who spend too much time overplaying. Things like gun control and zero-tolerance policies (i.e. in schools, to squelch all violent tendencies) that do more harm than good. You can't save everyone, and when you send emergency services to someone with a 40% chance of survival you're taking a risk on someone with an 80% chance of survival. While it's quite possible to save 95% of the old people that are probably dying in the snow, the cost comes at losing a larger percentage of at-risk people that are theoretically more likely to survive and more useful to society (i.e. fathers of teenagers, the working force, etc).

People live off empathy and emotions and get themselves in all kinds of trouble doing the wrong thing for the "right" reasons. You can't fault someone for being a bad person, but you can fault them for being short-sighted and stupid.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[bluefoxlucid]

It's not much of a proposal, more an observation. Everyone is crying that the "frail and weak" can die in these situations; but this is not an emergency situation, it is a culling. Technically the damage is isolated to a few people, and really these people were going to die in a few months or a short couple years anyway (face it, if you're 70 and fit and healthy enough to live to 90 without living assistance, you're not frail and weak), so we lose not very much.

Beyond that, we suddenly lose load on the social security system, medicare, etc; free up population density; and put assets back into the economy. Remember, people who are not in the workforce are not contributing to society. Volunteers are in the workforce; any community service rendered is contribution to society. Retirees trimming their garden or watching TV for the last couple years of their lives are just drains. We have various social contracts ranging from simply not executing you when you retire to social security and reduced tax burdens; but you are far from important.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[_0xd0ad]

It's probably a lot more common than you realise. And even if they typically eat a meal or two at home, if that is all they have to eat it won't last nearly as long as it normally would... especially if they also don't have the foresight to ration it sensibly.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[_0xd0ad]

Well... that's why I read them.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes because if they dont shut up there will be a homocide........

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[Ol Olsoc]

Beer idea - good. But a pale ale by definition has a lot of hops in it. You'd want that for it's preservative function anyhow. Lite beer? Nah, you'd want the alcohol for it's preservative function too too.

But partying diring a disaster is an awesome idea.!

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[Ol Olsoc]

Where did you get the idea that Ham radio is disappearing? Not hardly.

At the moment, the F.C.C calculates 696,960 Amateurs, in January 2011, their numbers were 696,302. The numbers fluctuate around a bit due to license expirations and operator expirations, but there are plenty of us out there.

http://ah0a.org/FCC/Licenses.html

There is a subset of Hams who are the "Get those damn kids off my lawn" types, and they are primarily the reason that some think that the avocation is going away - for them it is.

Other nuggets of their wisdom:

You can't be a real Ham unless you know Morse code

Any idiot can get a license these days.

It was so much better in the 50's, it's been all downhill since then.

Yet the rest of us are working the world without wires, no infrastructure needed, thanks.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[GooberToo]

I got that impression from endless articles over the last decade or more which has consistently asserted the number of hams have been on a steady decline.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[Ol Olsoc]

Dirty Laundry time! There has been a sort of internicene war going on for years between the advocates of Morse code testing, and those who wanted to abolish it. The Pro testing advocates in general believed that they were superior to those who didn't test for it, and the non-testing advocates thought of the Pro testers as old kooks or elitists.

As the battle raged, and it became apparent that the Pro testers were losing, many of them sort of turned on the hobby, so to speak. Ham radio was dying - or at least it was being taken over by the Visigoths, and it's doom was imminent. The numbers were going to drop, we were going to lose our bandwidth, the internet was going to kill Ham Radio, Cell Phones were going to kill Ham Radio, and on and on and on. Unfortunately, they were loud and verbose.

When in fact, the doom and gloom hams were simply wrong. After the elimination of Morse code testing, numbers increased, and here we are today. There are many digital modes that are a lot of fun, Computers are now tightly integrated into many if not most HamShacks. I personally enjoy a mode called PSK31, which uses Phase shifting to form the signal, which then appears on your computer screen. The overall effect is somewhat like a chat room, except using radio. And the "standard modes" are still doing great.

At VHF Frequencies, there is a mode called APRS (Automated Position Reporting System), which allows you to report your location - handy in emergencies and public service events, and to even send short text messages - we were tweeting before anyone knew tweeting. I use that to let my wife know where I am when I travel. aprs.fi has a worldwide site she can go to and see where I'm at. Slow scan television, fast scan television, sending balloons to crazy heights, just a small sampling of what is available. It's a blast! I highly encourage getting a license. The first level, Technician, is pretty easy, and the next two levels, General and Amateur Extra are harder.

And interestingly enough, Morse code use is thriving under the new system.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[Anonymous Coward]

If you live in an area where this scenario is bound to happen your probably prepared for it i would hope even elderly widows would have some common sense.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[EdIII]

I know the cable providers have some sort of battery back up as I have operated without power for quite some time before. As for generators, I could not really say. I have not been in a multi-day power outage for quite some time.

If the generator is diesel, and of a decent size, it will still only last a matter of days at best and there are a large number of CO's to outfit like that.

Assuming you are correct, and the COs have a better backup system, then a land line is still unnecessary. You get DSL instead. That same battery backup that would keep the land lines working would also keep the DSL working. I know this from personal experience as well. Now on my naked DSL line I did not have a dial tone. So you would still need to route your 911 calls through a VOIP provider.

Your argument works best to push DSL, not land lines. Same thing I mentioned before. More options with DSL Internet to communicate and VOIP is cheap and still has e911 service if you shop around and find a good provider.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[bluefoxlucid]

Beer idea - good. But a pale ale by definition has a lot of hops in it.

Only INDIA pale ale, because it has to be shipped far on a boat by heat. A basic british bitter is a nice pale ale with very little alcohol or hops, and you can make a smaller beer.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[raitchison]

I have 2 phones plugged in that work fine with no power, including the one on my night stand, I also have another one in a drawer I can use if needed.

The batteries at the CO will last longer than my UPS
The generator at the CO will last longer than my generator
The power company will put a higher priority on restoring power to the CO than they will to my house or my ISP for that matter.

As I mentioned previously, the ability to have a more reliable access to 911 is not the only reason we have a land line. We use it for our local calls which don't cost us anything extra.

It's simply ridiculous to claim that a land line is no more reliable than VoIP, in the last 2 major earthquakes we have seen (94 and 71) power was out for more than a day but the land line never stopped working, after the initial flood of calls following the quakes the phones worked fine for contacting & communicating with friends & family.

If I switched to a VoIP provider I could save a few bucks but I've introduced several more potential points of failure into the scenario, even if I have a spare DSL modem and router (which I do) they won't run more than a few hours on a consumer-grade UPS, I suppose I could buy a $1000 higher end UPS to run me for longer but that's going to create it's own problems and increase my power costs.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[GooberToo]

I very much appreciate the clarification. I'm happy to hear the ham is not a dying beast.

I actually knew about APRS. Someone I know tested it from his plane and compared it against more modern geo reporting services. It actually surpassed several commercial services (for his test) where coverage existed. Obviously flying where APRS coverage is not available resulted in no position reports. Just the same, some of those commercial offers had even worst reporting. Seems visibility and location within the aircraft made huge differences in reporting.

Many people are surprised to hear that hams and pilots have a lot in common for emergencies. Frequently after disasters, hams are the first to report out. Afterwards, based on those reports, private pilots are frequently the first in (supplies in and people out) ; typically beating the National Guard.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[EdIII]

The batteries at the CO will last longer than my UPS
The generator at the CO will last longer than my generator

Okay. Your power at your house will not last as long as the power at the CO, or at the POPs for the cable providers, or the wireless towers. That's why you have a generator. If your telling me that you can't keep some working power over a few days, and emergency power available for short periods, you need to revisit your plans.

The power company will put a higher priority on restoring power to the CO than they will to my house or my ISP for that matter.

That's an assumption. Land lines are dying, and VOIP that is being provided by the cable providers, and even the telcos at this point, is just as important as the analog infrastructure in the COs. If we looked at subscriber rates it will not be much longer before priority shifts.

Besides, DSL is supported by the COs. So that is an ISP that would get priority service under your assumption.

As I mentioned previously, the ability to have a more reliable access to 911 is not the only reason we have a land line. We use it for our local calls which don't cost us anything extra.

You're paying $25 per month for that. Assuming 5c per minute that would be a call volume of 500 minutes per month. That's assuming local calls only. With VOIP you get 5 times that amount and the same rate for all long distance calls as well. Not to mention some extremely aggressive international rates that compete with the calling cards on the street. Ohhh, and that was just assuming outbound local calls. Inbound is unlimited.

It's simply ridiculous to claim that a land line is no more reliable than VoIP, in the last 2 major earthquakes we have seen (94 and 71) power was out for more than a day but the land line never stopped working, after the initial flood of calls following the quakes the phones worked fine for contacting & communicating with friends & family.

It's also a little silly to try to make comparisons of our infrastructure today against what existed in 94, and especially in 71. Battery technology is better, solar is better, generators are more efficient, etc. You're dismissal of my argument basically boils down to that the infrastructure supporting residential internet, and the VOIP being offered by those ISPs, can't *possibly* be as good as the CO infrastructure because of events 15 and 40 years old at this point.... when Internet and Cable Internet did not even exist.

If I switched to a VoIP provider I could save a few bucks but I've introduced several more potential points of failure into the scenario, even if I have a spare DSL modem and router (which I do) they won't run more than a few hours on a consumer-grade UPS, I suppose I could buy a $1000 higher end UPS to run me for longer but that's going to create it's own problems and increase my power costs.

You have not introduced as many points of failure as you think. All the COs are digital at this point. That's why it is easy for them to offer DSL. Your analog phone call is converted into VOIP already. It's just a different platform and codecs, but it is still packetized and transmitted across TCP/IP. So if the Internet really has a problem (their routers), assuming your phone calls will go through too is a mistake.

You're belief that analog phones are superior really just comes down to your faith in the reliability of the last mile analog circuit between you and the CO. It is not any more reliable than DSL. In fact, its reliability is the same as DSL because it shares the same equipment.

If you get a VOIP line through the cable provider, which is the most reliable, your 911 calls will go through as reliable as that analog land line. This is because for local calls that cable provider has their own PSTN routing point and they will place their calls through the local telco to your PSAP

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[NateTech]

All depends on if your public regulators in your area made the incumbent telco battery-back the DSL system.

I'm not making an argument for having a land-line, my assumption is that the upstream inter-machine trunks are all going to be overloaded and phones are utterly useless in a real disaster.

I'm just sharing that the battery banks are diesel-generator backed-up at all CO's, and that they're high in the priority list for emergency managers behind hospitals, morgues (keeping the generators at morgues running for refrigeration is very high priority), public safety dispatch/radio facilities, and then private companies that own "infrastructure".

Both COs and large data centers are on that "second tier" disaster list for fuel deliveries. In a real disaster, the fuel doesn't even get to the "top tier"... so it doesn't really matter.

This whole "10,000 calls to 911" over a snowstorm is just a precursor to how many people are going to die when a real disaster happens in the overpopulated East Coast.

Re:Que the "Can you hear me now" jokes

[gmhowell]

Woosh.

At&T

[hammer_gaidin]

I would like to see At&t's dropped call number for the same period.

Re:At&T

[Khisanth Magus]

Probably less, because more than likely a lot of these are from areas that at&t has spotty coverage at the best of times, so more than likely there wouldn't be any dropped calls because the people with at&t couldn't get a signal to even make the call.

Re:At&T

[Anonymous Coward]

And I would have went the "If AT&T were greater, they'd have made headlines instead." If they didn't have a signal where they needed 911 (e.g. home), they probably wouldn't have AT&T, no?

Overloaded?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can the 911 processing centers handle that many calls? Anyone have stats on how many calls they normally process? I'm not sure where to look for that data...

15th Post! I would have had first post, but my posts kept being dropped.

Re:Overloaded?

[v1]

I was thinking the same thing, 10k calls is a lot for a 911 center to field, even with automated systems for overflow. But it'd be more interesting to know if they were failed to connect calls, or dropped calls. Dropped calls would indicate the center was answering the calls and verizon was cutting them off.

Owell as a lot of posters above have touched on, (911 and cell phones in general) have become quite a crutch for people, encouraging them to do stupid things like drive in blizzards since they have a cell phone and it makes them feel safer and bolder.

People like that, insisting on driving when they flat out tell you NOT to travel, a little frostbite waiting for help might be a valuable lesson to them. Lil bit of Darin at work maybe.

Re:Overloaded?

[Locke2005]

Most likely the cellular network software is programmed to give up after a specific time with no answer. So not a hardware problem, more like a problem with software not anticipating really long wait times for a 911 operator to answer. And of course, the system was never tested under such a high load.

Re:Overloaded?

[v1]

And of course, the system was never tested under such a high load.

I'm sure that's what this investigation is going to be focusing on. Because yes the are supposed to test it under high load. Obviously this can't be done with actual calls, but they're required to run simulations on very high call volume to see how the system will handle it. You don't just build a critical system that "in theory can meet the design specs" and then not test it.

And if they didn't do that, did it incompetently, or lied about the results, someone's in a lot of trouble.

Re:Overloaded?

[shakah]

There are regulations for this, something along the lines of requiring one 9-1-1 trunk per 5k lines. Seems wildly low, but (as you alluded to) the PSAPs can only handle so many calls, and in the case of a major event a lot of calls would be redundant anyway (e.g. all neighbors on a block calling to report the same fire at a nearby house).

/. News Network

[Even on Slashdot FOE]

Today's top story - adverse weather conditions can negatively affect cell phone reception. In other news, high winds can knock down telephone poles and prevent phone calls.

Clearly we need some sort of communication method that is immune to weather, but what could it possibly be?

Re:/. News Network

[grim4593]

Quantum Entanglement.

Re:/. News Network

[ByOhTek]

nuclear detonation facilitated morse code?

I'm sure that would visible at a huge distance, regardless of weather. Sure it'd be a bit harmful to the sender, but nothing is perfect, eh?

Re:/. News Network

[Anonymous Coward]

You win!

My profession involves RF communications. Being able to get 90% of digital data through error free on a wireless network is considered excellent. Of course, most modern systems have all sorts of error correction techniques to compensate, but the point is no wireless system will deliver 100% correct digital data the first time. Add weather into the picture (or even solar flares) and that rate drops even further.

Re:/. News Network

[buzzsawddog]

I was thinking smoke signals but.... It might be difficult to light a fire when the wind is blowing. Good news is you could keep warm if its cold.

Re:/. News Network

[pipatron]

Dig the cables down, like in developed countries?

Re:/. News Network

[Even on Slashdot FOE]

Then the cables need to be immune to the fiber-seeking backhoe. Also, environmentalists would much rather accept a large amount of pollution later to prevent a small amount of pollution now.

Re:/. News Network

[Anonymous Coward]

The festoons of aerial cabling decorating American towns are one of their most charming features. They really give them a "third world" quality.

Re:/. News Network

[Amouth]

always keep a piece of fiber in your pocket, that way if you get lost or stranded you can just bury it. then when the backhoe comes to dig it up ask the driver for directions/help.

Re:/. News Network

[cayenne8]

"Dig the cables down, like in developed countries?"

Well, depends on how shallow your water table is.

We can't even bury our dead below ground here in New Orleans.

:)

Re:/. News Network

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not always economical. Frankly, putting cable far enough under ground that frost won't be a problem is very expensive in some areas.

In highly developed areas, such as a city, it's more likely to work, but in the boonies you're often better off dealing with the occasional tree falling on a line than putting it underground.

Re:/. News Network

[517714]

In New Orleans, the correct term is not ground, it is river bed.

Re:/. News Network

[Anonymous Coward]

nuclear detonation facilitated morse code?...Sure it'd be a bit harmful to the sender

And on the other end of that communication:
"Hey look, and emergency signal! Alright, that was either an 'e' or a 't'............hmmm, nothing else. I guess the emergency must be over."

Re:/. News Network

[Anonymous Coward]

So you'd prefer to take the risk that some cables may be accidentally chopped by a backhoe over the near-certainty that power line will be dropped by an ice storm, or other foul weather?

It reminds me of this: would you rather live next to a coal-fired power station and accept the certainty that you will get sick over the risk of living next to a nuclear power station and some slim chance that the damn thing will melt down?

Any way, the only reason US cities (apart from high water tables) won't put cables underground is that they do everything as cheaply as possible and have no interest in investing in quality infrastructure for everyone's benefit. It's the United States of Tight-Arses if you ask me...

Re:/. News Network

[Anonymous Coward]

That is a good indication you're city is in a terrible location. IMO the lowest areas of New Orleans should not be rebuilt. Bulldoze them and turn them into parks or something.

Can you....

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you Save me now?

Phone Service

[Anonymous Coward]

Phone service in USA sucks harder than a Thai hooker.

Re:Phone Service

[scharkalvin]

Er, how would you know? (maybe I don't WANT to know!)

Re:Phone Service

[Siridar]

Well, obviously, he's got a phone service in the USA.

New AT&T Commercial: Best service in blizzards

[Anonymous Coward]

Best service in blizzards!*

*study conducted in Southern California.

Give us more facts...

[buzzsawddog]

Not all dropped calls are created equally... Some areas are just not designed to get cell coverage. It almost makes me wonder if some one is needing to use 911 if they are often in that area. Also what is the ratio of dropped calls to calls made? 10,000 out of 10,000 would be an alarming rate but what about 10,000 out of 1,000,000. How many dropped calls are customer induced? This article tells us nothing...

Re:Give us more facts...

[kjdames]

Also what is the ratio of dropped calls to calls made?

With all due respect, I don't see how that is even relevant. If one dropped call to 911 ended in tragedy, it is alarming. I understand the provider is under no obligation to guarantee 911 service in any particular area, but that is the one service we should be able to depend on. The #1 reason I have a cell phone is in case of an emergency. Obviously I enjoy the other capabilities it gives me, but if the only thing you could use a cell phone for was to call 911, I would still get one for my wife. I have a feeling the majority of (mature) people with cell phones feel the same way.

Re:Give us more facts...

[DanTheManMS]

Also what is the ratio of dropped calls to calls made? 10,000 out of 10,000 would be an alarming rate but what about 10,000 out of 1,000,000.

10,000 out of 1,000,000 is still a 1% dropped call rate. When I interned at an ISP that also served as a VOIP telecom (not Verizon), anything less than 99.999% availability was investigated and usually reported to the FCC due to legal obligations. A single missed 911 call is a very big deal and I would hope Verizon treats it as such.

Re:Give us more facts...

[Kryptonian Jor-El]

1 death is a tragedy, 10,000 is a statistic

Re:Give us more facts...

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. The article also doesn't state what their normal ratio of dropped calls is. I get drop outs quite often, but that is the price I pay from going from AT&T to a provider that is half the price. I knew I wasn't going to get as good of reception.

I noticed that during the storms, my signal strength went way down. I could yell and scream at my provider, or accept the fact that I chose a provider with weak coverage in my area, or walk a few feet to the other side of the house and place a call.

Its a known fact, wireless networks are finiky based on weather. I know they operate on different frequencies, but, you get a thunderstorm, your satelite drops out. A bit stronger of a storm, and you see noise on your OTA antenna (or dropouts now as we are all ATSC now). Why would you expect your cell phone, which you have issues with in good weather with dropouts, to work perfectly during bad weather?

Re:Give us more facts...

[tophermeyer]

True, at the individual level we expect that our calls for emergency assistance will be received. It's tragic and terrifying when they're not.

But the parents point was that, from the perspective of service level to society at large, a 100% dropped call rate is very different than a 1% dropped call rate.

AT&T vs Verizon

[Anonymous Coward]

OK...here come all the anecdotal stories about this one friend who had an uncle who's girlfriend's cousin had a 911 call dropped by AT&T, so they're not only bad, they're WORSE!

Re:AT&T vs Verizon

[Anonymous Coward]

As a matter of fact, I do have this one friend who had an uncle who's girlfriend's cousin had a 911 call dropped by AT&T, you insensitive clod!

Let em die.

[cstanley8899]

Well... we have folks who can't figure out the whole milk and bread thing like everyone else seems to be good at. Apparently they are too stupid to live. So it's probably best they starve.

I would like to blame Verizon but...

[Falsify]

This was a Blizzard of historic magnitude. People should take the warnings they were given and be prepared for the worst in anycase. Cell phone or no cell phone!

Re:I would like to blame Verizon but...

[Anonymous Coward]

HA, this was no Blizzard of historic magnitude, last year the same area got 2 blizzards back to back for a total of over 2 FEET in under a week. This Blizzard that caused this issue was not quite a foot, they relay do not have much excuse here since from what I have heard the issue has more to do with the lack of redundant fiber links to the 911 ops centers.

AT&T Migrators thoughts irrelevant.

[aburnstine]

It wasn't Verizon Wireless that dropped the calls, it was Verizon Landline that lost 14 CAMA trunks used by ALL wireless carriers. Also, the calls weren't dropped, they got busy signals. Bad, but different and comparing Verizon Wireless to AT&T Wireless are irrelevant to this story.

Re:AT&T Migrators thoughts irrelevant.

[bdevoe]

This is good information but not present in either the story above or the one referenced. I'm sure that's why there's a comparison.

Re:AT&T Migrators thoughts irrelevant.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah - the problem with AT&T is that you won't even get the CHANCE to make the call - and that doesn't just apply to iPhone 4 users who have the audacity to try and use a phone while holding it.

Anyone who's used AT&T is major areas knows that you'll be allowed to attempt the call, but nothing will happen, you won't get the "ring" sound, you'll just wait a bit and then get dropped to the "call failed" screen without ever placing a call.

Another favorite AT&T gimmick is to see you have four bars, place a call, get "call failed," and discover that you've gone from 4 bars to 1 for no apparent reason, in the EXACT SAME PLACE.

At least with Verizon, you get a busy signal and can try again later.

Re:AT&T Migrators thoughts irrelevant.

[Anonymous Coward]

The likely cause was the PBXs in the PSAPs not responding quickly enough to incoming calls and giving service-not-available signals, causing the trunk lines to believe the PBX was out of service. This happens a lot. The difference here was that no-one paid attention to the trunk alarms and investigated, including the PSAPs.

Yeah, but

[Lucas123]

AT&T does that on almost every clear day, in the Northeast, between 12 p.m. and 5 p.m. EST.

Disconnect v Drop

[UninformedCoward]

TFA explains first that 10000 calls were dropped but the investigation showed that it was 10000 calls failing to connect. Isn't this two completely different situations? The first being the customer connecting then being disconnected and the second never actually connecting. I could see someone failing to connect at all then attempt to dial multiple times in quick succession...

Ten million calls?

[Anonymous Coward]

10,000,911 is a lot of calls to drop, but the question is out of how many?

911 call center lines

[shoppa]

My impression listening to this boil up in the local media, is that the issue was not just dropped cellphone calls on one cellphone carrier, but rather the routing and concentration of 911 calls into several of the 911 call centers. Essentially the 911 call centers "phone company" is Verizon and some SNAFU between Verizon and the call center was resulting in dropped calls. This is not any new technology problem, going back to the creation of 911 the original PBX's simply melted under any intermittent high call volume.

Re:911 call center lines

[inKubus]

There's no real excuse for this anymore, other than the local carrier (verizon in this case) skimping on hardware. I mean how hard is it to stack a digital trunk? Not hard. But the problem is, like you say, 911 is for personal emergencies and people think they should call 911 in the event of widespread emergencies, which isn't going to help much. The emergency response system is not designed to handle massive events, it costs too much and it wouldn't add much value. In a widespread emergency, you might get help, but only if you're in a well equiped neighborhood. If you live in a poor neighborhood with low property taxes, they probably spend fairly little on fire and police. If you're in the country, you probably have 1 sheriff for a few hundred miles square. Private ambulance companies might think there's a market there or they might not. If not, you're going to be left without help for a while. So, obviously, you need to be able to take care of yourself to a certain extent. Most people in the country know this already and have a woodstove, wood, generator, well, etc. In the city you are part of the system where unfortunately the tax dollars aren't going to cover a hospital bed and fireman for every man, woman and child. Yes, the feds can come with FEMA, where they can basically bring that level of response to a small area, but it costs a ton and it's not something done lightly. Don't count on that for at least a few days. So, what can you do, if you live in an apartment in NYC? Well, you should keep a minimum level of supplies around, especially water. You should replace/rotate them once a year. You should have battery powered lighting equipment. And you should have sleeping bags.

Need more info.

[JustAnotherIdiot]

How many calls of this nature did AT&T drop? T-Mobile? (insert other wireless carrier here)? Is it exclusive to Verizon?

Of these 10,000 calls dropped, how many of them were repeat calls by the same phone? Was it just 100 people that called 100 times before they connected, or 10,000 people only getting one drop each? Or was it just one really bored guy that called in 10,000 times and just wasn't getting a signal?

The article states this happened in Washington's suburbs, was a tower KOed, leaving many without reception, and in turn they all called 911 about it?

I could go on like this for awhile, the point is that this is not enough data to draw any kind of conclusion.

Re:Need more info.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just one dropped 911 call can be life threatening, regardless of the cause. Can any cell provider determine the exact cause of every dropped call, doubtful! When the signal fades away it is gone. What caused that fade? Many variables would need to be known. Conditions, i.e. distance, phone location, terrain, etc., for every call is different. What is the cell tower density(distance between towers)? Many variables would need to be known!

If Verizon has a problem during system-wide high-stress periods, what kind of problems do the other providers have? It is very unlikely that they would voluntarily provide that kind of information. There are only two ways that the information could be obtained. One, the users demand that information, good luck with that! Two, the FCC require the information. I, for one, do not like the idea of big government but this is a matter of public safety!

I will be writing the FCC to inquire if they can request that information from the cell phone providers. I will also request that information from my provider. If neither can provide the information then why not. You and I are the ones paying for something that our lives may depend on. We should know what we are paying for and how well it will work when a major emergency occurs.

Re:Need more info.

[tophermeyer]

How many calls of this nature did AT&T drop? T-Mobile? (insert other wireless carrier here)? Is it exclusive to Verizon?

This wasn't Verizon Wireless, but Verizon the landline provider. Evidently a number of trunks at some point in the link between the cell towers and the 911 centers went down. It was an issue with Verizon's landlines that happened to effect only cell towers, and thus local cell coverage.

It's happened before

[Locke2005]

After the Loma Prieta earthquake hit San Francisco, I couldn't make any cell phone calls at all. Why? Everybody in the country was calling into the area resulting in the land line network taking over 2 minutes to put up a dial tone. But the cellular providers timed calls out after 60 seconds with no dial tone!

Re:It's happened before

[Peeteriz]

911 is prioritised so that all the other calls are unable to connect or are deliberately dropped to 'make space' - both fixed-line systems and wireless cell towers have this built in especially for such occasions - so this experience is not relevant to the case.

You should be able to connect 911 with a cell phone that has been disconnected for not paying the bills, in the middle of a peak-usage situation (say, large public event) while many phones are unable to connect to the network because the cell has reached max capacity - the systems are designed to do that; and if they didn't work in this case, then that is either gross negligence or a major technical problem worth investigating.

Re:It's happened before

[Locke2005]

Unless it's timing out because the 911 operators themselves are taking too long to answer... still bad programming, but not a major technical problem.

Re:It's happened before

[Peeteriz]

It's not what's happened here - the call centre was available, but for ~2 hours the calls from the affected phone switches were not routed to them.

I wonder why...

[Dancindan84]

I wonder why they bothered putting 10 000 911. "Roughly 10 million" probably would have been fine.

Re:I wonder why...

[Anonymous Coward]

I get it and that my friend is funny

Re:I wonder why...

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder why they bothered putting 10 000 911. "Roughly 10 million" probably would have been fine.

It said 10,000 - 911 calls were dropped, not 10000911 911 calls!

Re:I wonder why...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you missed a comma there. What's a 000 911 call anyway, and what's the big deal if ten of them were dropped?

Re:I wonder why...

[SleazyRidr]

Well, 000 is the emergency number in Australia, so I guess you'd call 000 911 if you had some cross-continental emergency and needed assistance in both Australia and the USA.

There's probably only 10 of those in a year, so if all 10 of them are getting dropped that makes me worried.

Re:I wonder why...

[Weedhopper]

It was over 9000. That's all that really matters.

They didn't know it was down!

[Anonymous Coward]

The biggest problem is not that the network went down, but rather Verizon did not realize it was down. Other news stories with more facts listed mention that upon a Sheriff alerting them, they had the network back up in 15 minutes.

Re:They didn't know it was down!

[Bill Dimm]

I'm not surprised. The last time my Verizon DSL had problems (50% packet loss), I went to bed thinking it would be fixed when I got up in the morning. Not only was it still not working the next morning, but when I called them they had no idea there was a problem.

Re:They didn't know it was down!

[shuz]

If this is Verizon DSL home service than it would not be surprising as the only monitoring they typically do is a link dead warning. Home users can unplug their DSL modem from the wall and they won't get a call from Verizon. A business DSL customer/contract would get a prompt call from Verizon if that same modem were unplugged. That is the difference between a Home contract and a Business contract. The cost difference being sometimes hundreds of dollars for the extra monitoring and uptime securities.

How many have phones that don't require power?

[HockeyPuck]

Let's say the power goes out... and you need to make a phone call. How many people today have phones that do not require power (or rather take their power from the phone line)?

If you have a cordless phone you need power, not for the handset but for the base. When the time comes you'll wish you kept your $10 "Walmart Special".

Re:How many have phones that don't require power?

[adolf]

A little bit of power is easy.

I've got a decent-sized UPS powering my home office. When the power dips, I shut down the computers and kill the UPS. This leaves a lot of clean 120V of power available for whatever small task(s). I used it a couple of days ago when the transformer feeding my house blew up from ice buildup, and it kept about 500W of gear alive for about 10 minutes, depleting the battery to only about 85% -- I'm too lazy to do the math, but that obviously means lots of charging small electronics and placing POTS calls.

I don't have a regular phone anymore, but the last time I did it was with AT&T Uverse. Uverse provides its own battery backup, which seems to be good for a day or so of use (keeping the router, wifi, and telephone ports working, along with a 4-port switch).

Meanwhile, my old Panasonic cordless phone has its own battery backup. It's a simple little DC-powered battery pack, which (AFAICT) has no or nearly no electronics. I picked it up from some online Panasonic parts supplier, and it was cheap. I've never seen a similar item for sale retail, which is unfortunate, since everyone who wants to rely on POTS and has a cordless phone should have such a thing.

Any of these things can be used sparingly, turned off when not needed, and easily last through whatever sort of event.

I've got a few old (but digital) cell phones, too, from various carriers. (CDMA. I probably should pick up a PCS and/or GSM handset at some point.)

And if all that fails: I've got a small, ratty inverter that I can power from any of the three working vehicles outside. It's a bit of wear-and-tear to keep a gas-powered car engine idling long-term, but if it looks like it'll be a Long, Long Time I'm handy enough to fudge the idle speed up a bit to keep the oil pressure high and the coolant flowing well. (The ratty nature of the inverter is important, too: By completely failing to actually emulate a proper sine wave, it's quite efficient compared to the UPS mentioned above, while perfectly capable of driving switch-mode power supplies.)

And if I can't get outside: I'll get outside anyway. I keep a digging shovel, a chainsaw, a big hammer, a good pry bar, and a combination Mattock pick in the house. (In the basement, actually: If a tornado ever levels this place around me, I want to be prepared to liberate myself, but it's also a simple practical matter in that I must keep them somewhere.)

And if everything really, really fails: I've got an Icom VHF portable radio with a good battery, programmed with the local radio club's repeater, along with some local public safety bands and the private ambulance operator just down the road from here, which I can charge from either 12VDC or 120VAC. I'm not licensed to talk on any of these frequencies, but I genuinely don't believe that it will matter: If things turn horrible and I absolutely require assistance after Verizon kills the 911 trunks, I will be able to summon help.

Most of this is just stuff that I'd have around anyway (UPS for clean power, inverter for convenience, shovel/pick/chainsaw for yard work, VHF portable for work, etc). I think that if folks can't figure out how to communicate, that they must be doing something wrong.

Re:How many have phones that don't require power?

[HockeyPuck]

99.999% of americans when asked "What is UPS" will respond with "a package delivery company"

Re:How many have phones that don't require power?

[adolf]

Naah. They'll reply with "a bunch of brown trucks," since "package delivery company" has too high of a syllable-to-word ratio for layfolk to be able to conjure such parlance.

The calls weren't "dropped"

[Anonymous Coward]

The weren't connected. And it wasn't a problem of Verizon Wireless, but rather Verizon (landline). Read the FCC letter for more detail. http://www.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2011/db0218/DA-11-328A1.pdf

Here's the FCC letter to Verizon

[mschaffer]

http://www.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2011/db0218/DA-11-328A1.pdf

Kathleen M. Grub
Senior Vice President
Public Affairs, Policy & Communications
Verizon Communications
1300 I St. NW, Room 400W
Washington, DC USA 20005

Re: Failed 9-1-1 Calls During January 26, 2011 Snowstorm

Dear Ms. Grub,
The FCC has received reports that during the snowstorm that hit the Washington D.C. region on January 26, 2011, approximately 8,300 wireless
9-1-1 calls to the Montgomery County Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP), routed over the Verizon network, were not connected, and an additional 1,700
wireless calls to the Prince George's County PSAP were not connected. I know that you will agree that any 9-1-1 call which is not connected can have serious
consequences, but the large number of missed 9-1-1 calls on January 26 is truly alarming. I therefore request that Verizon provide an explanation of the causes
of this and similar failures, provide Verizon's assessment of the possibility of occurrence in other locations and describe what actions Verizon is taking to
prevent recurrence of these problems.

Here is a synopsis of what we understand so far. Through our initial discussions with various parties, including representatives of Verizon, we have
learned that the Montgomery County PSAP has fourteen trunks that handle wireless calls, seven each from the Rockville and Hyattsville Selective Routers.
The trunks from these Selective Routers to the PSAPs are maintained by Verizon (not Verizon Wireless), and there are separate trunks for wireline, wireless and
VoIP calls. At approximately 5:15 p.m. on January 26, Verizon's system automatically took one of the wireless 9-1-1 trunks out of service. It is our
understanding that this was not an overload. We understand that it is normal in large-scale emergencies for the call volume to exceed the trunk capacity, in
which case calls will be blocked until another trunk opens up. In this instance, however, the Verizon system took each of the fourteen trunks handling wireless
calls out of service sequentially so that they could not receive any more calls. By 8:45 p.m., the problem had cascaded to the other thirteen 9-1-1 trunks handling
wireless calls, so that all of the trunks handling wireless 9-1-1 traffic in Montgomery County were taken out of service by the system.

These trunks have working alarms, but Verizon did not notify the PSAPs of the failure after the alarms went off. The Montgomery County PSAP
recognized the problem just prior to 11:00 p.m. and notified Verizon. By 11:15 p.m., Verizon had placed all the trunks back into service.

Similarly, eight of the ten trunks that serve wireless calls for the Prince George's County PSAP were taken out of service automatically by Verizon on
January 26 by approximately 8:30 p.m. A ninth trunk was taken out shortly thereafter. Four were restored by 10:30 p.m.; all trunks were finally restored by
approximately 11:00 p.m.

It is not clear what caused these individual trunks to be taken out of service. Your experts have postulated that the increased call volume resulting
from the snowstorm created a timing problem on the trunks which caused them to be automatically taken out of service. However, the Private Branch Exchange
(PBX) in the Montgomery County PSAP is a relatively new CS1000E, which has the speed and capacity to handle the number of calls that were being routed.
The Prince George's County PSAP's PBX is older, but since the PBX has fewer trunks connected to it, the PBX should be able handle the call volume. The slow
response of the PBX's does not appear to be the cause of the failures.

I would note that the events of January 26 are not unique and that other similar 9-1-1 outages have occurred recently in the region. On December 17th,
2010, the Prince George's County PSAP and on July 25, 2010, the Montgomery County PSAP exper

Re:Here's the FCC letter to Verizon

[slimjim8094]

I'm going to link that to people who tell me that the FCC doesn't know what they're doing when it comes to regulation.

Re:Here's the FCC letter to Verizon

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy Shit! Facts!

this should be

[nimbius]

an interesting investigation...it would be neat to see from a technical standpoint what happened, what broke down, what worked, and how the cellular network can be protected and enhanced in the future to make sure this doesnt happen. could open source technology have maybe provided a better solution too?

the thing to remember is this is news for nerds, and stuff that matters. so the summary can be completely disregarded after its title as the author flagrantly touted a bit of bias at the end that makes the story just a smear piece at best. to think that any telecommunications network is inherently superior to another without at least a technical summary of its legitimate capabilities and systems is ludicrous.

Why compare to AT&T?

[Bobfrankly1]

Can't wait to see what all those AT&T migrators think.

I wonder why all those calls went through the Verizon network. Could it be that AT&T doesn't have reliable service in that area to begin with?

It is Verizon's fault!

[mschaffer]

Another article (http://www.gazette.net/stories/02162011/montnew184543_32539.php) shows that this has been an ongoing problem in a three-county area---perhaps even nationwide.

Verizon acknowledged the problem and are at fault for not notifying the 911 center that there was a problem. (In fact, the 911 center had to call Verizon to alert them of the problem.) Similar problems nearby occurred on Jan. 31, when cell phone calls could not be received between 9:36 p.m. and 2 a.m., an on Dec. 17, when cell phone callers could not reach 911 dispatchers for seven hours.

Verizon designed, installed, and operates these systems. Who's fault do you think it is?

Re:It is Verizon's fault!

[Falsify]

May be their fault but it doesnt change the general point I was making which is if you know a Blizzard is coming, you prepare for it. Don't rely on goverment or emergency services in such situations. Look at Katrina. Cmon now.

Re:It is Verizon's fault!

[mschaffer]

Verizon isn't monitoring their own equipment, but they had to be told their system wasn't working by the County Sheriff. Shortly after that (approx 15 minutes) the system was restarted and working.

There was no blizzard on Dec. 17 or Jan 31. What's their excuse for these dates?

"Cmon now." You pay for these services. If they cannot keep it running, I would prefer to have a refund! This is hardly like Katrina, it's just routing a phone call.

Holy cow!

[Shoten]

The article says 10,000 calls failed to connect during one blizzard. Can't wait to see what all those AT&T migrators think.

I've actually spotted an AT&T fanboi!

We think....

[roc97007]

that it's still better than AT&T. If I drop a call, I can retry. If I got no bars, I can't try at all.

Re:We think....

[bhv]

Funny, we left Verizon for AT&T recently and the vastly improved coverage will keep us there.

Re:We think....

[roc97007]

Your mileage, as always, may vary, but Verizon succeeded where AT&T failed in three very key areas -- reception at my work, reception at my home, and reception on the route between. "Why" is immaterial; despite all the marketing, it's the ability to make a call that counts. (Note I didn't even say 'reliably make a call'.)

Re:We think....

[evilviper]

. If I got no bars, I can't try at all.

Actually, with a 911 call, you can, and odds are good it'll go through. The first thing a cell phone does when it sees the magic 911 is to crank-up the power output to the absolute max, and basically remove all other restrictions as well.

BTW, why no love for Sprint?

Trusting a 911 call to a cellphone

[Punto]

The land phone system consists of a cable hooked up to a microphone and a speaker. The dialing tones are a hack a layer above it, the old pulse system worked by cutting the circuit in rapid succession.
A cellphone is a fully functional computer with a power source, that has to connect to a network of computers and transmit data that needs to be decoded by complex software in real time over radio.

Would your really trust a 911 call to a cellphone? this has nothing to do with "Verizon", whatever that is, people need to pick up the phone and dial 911 on their landline if they have an emergency.

Re:Trusting a 911 call to a cellphone

[compro01]

This has everything to do with Verizon.

This is only tangentially related to wireless, as it has nothing to do with the actual cell network. The problem was the trunk lines (which handle ALL wireless traffic, from every carrier, not just Verizon wireless) which handled wireless traffic (they have separate sets of trunks for wireless and landline) to the Montgomery County Public Safety Answering Point (The centre that handles all 911 calls for that area) all went down in some kind of cascade failure (One went down at 5:15pm, then by 8:45pm, all 14 were down) and Verizon was unaware of the outage until employees at the centre there clued in and alerted Verizon at 11:00pm, then they got them working again by 11:15pm.

This same problem could have just as easily knocked over the trunk lines handling landline calls.

You can get all the info here (1.1MB PDF warning)

Irrelevant sensationalistic statistic

[jklovanc]

So there were 10000 unconnected calls; so what. When someone dials 911 and does not get through they try again until they do. For example, if someone tried to get through to 911 and it took 11 tries that would account for 10 unconnected calls. They still got through; it just took a little longer. What if the issue was 10000 people who had to try twice? A temperature emergency is a bit different than a fire. In most cases a five or ten minute delay in responding to weather emergency will not change the situation.

Re:Irrelevant sensationalistic statistic

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that's not what happened. It appears that what happened is that despite having numerous trunks to handle 911 calls, they were all shut down one after another for no apparent reason. The call volume was high, but not enough that it should have overloaded them, and the trunks did not come back up until the 911 call center finally called Verizon to find out what the deal was.

In other words, there were so few 911 calls actually getting through that the 911 call center noticed that something wasn't right and called Verizon to have them look into it.

It wasn't 10k people who had to try twice... it was more like a few thousand people who had to try 4 or 5 times and never did get through, until Verizon finally got on the ball and fixed it.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

the calls were due to an insane

[Anonymous Coward]

number of drivers on the road in horrible weather conditions. It was the worst traffic we've seen in this area since 9/11, and this is a place that has terrible traffic problems on a good day. There were abandoned cars, 10 hour commutes, closed roads, accidents everywhere. Day care centers had to stay open all night because parents could not get out of standstill traffic to pick up their kids. Parking lots were full of people sleeping in their cars because they couldn't get home. The dropped calls is not the issue as emergency vehicles could not get anywhere anyway. It was a total fail in our nation's capital.

This is why we still have a landline

[WindBourne]

Qwest (now some other company) has horrible service. HOWEVER, it is a landline, in which you have a connection that is pretty solid IFF everything is buried. Perhaps most importantly, is that the RBOCs will not overallocate the calls on the backbones. Finally, they prioritize calls over net. This contrasts with Cable esp. Comcast. During an large crisis, you will NOT get through with either comcast, most cables, and absolutely NONE of the wireless. So, your best bet is to have cable for the network, an RBOC for a cheap cheap landline (as in skip the perks), and of course one of the wireless.

Re:This is why we still have a landline

[compro01]

A landline may not help with this sort of situation. The problem was with the trunk lines (they have separate sets of trunk lines for landlines, wireless, and VOIP) to the 911 answering centre going down for several hours and Verizon not knowing it (until the employees at the centre figured something was wrong and alerted Verizon). There doesn't appear to be any reason same problem couldn't happen to the trunk lines for landlines.

Re:This is why we still have a landline

[WindBourne]

I think that you miss the point. What you speak of, is why we have Wireless, landline via RBOC and net over cable. Redundancy is a good thing.

Huh? There are many cold places, without heating

[tanveer1979]

In the west concept of heated winters is accepted.
But remember, there are still lots of towns in other parts of the world, for example, Himalayan India, where winter temp falls to -25 degree C. One town saw a low of -50 degree C.
those places have very little electric supply in winters, and because its a cold desert, firewood is scarce. So they make do with blankets.
In those areas there are some nomads who live outdoors in this weather, digging a pit, setting up a tent and using little firewood.

So you can survive -10 to -20 just with blankets very well

Re:Obligatory [clicky please]

[rtfa-troll]

The calls were dropped because the trunks (over which calls flow) were disabled in software. Nothing to do with "rain fade" or some abstract wireless issue.

Interesting. Completely unacceptable. Not at all clear from the Bloomsberg article. I wish posters would link to something which had a link back to the the original article. This was a big hassle to find.

Looking at it, something is deeply wrong here. Clearly the operations staff completely missed what should be a big bunch of serious alarms over a period of about five hours!!! Even more, Verizon's network people don't seem to be able to give a clear answer about what went wrong (though at a guess the measured BER on the trunks went up because they were properly in use for the first time - which shows incomplete testing, long term ignoring alarms and a switch system which measures BER badly). If this were in another country and the FCC wasn't so afraid of the operators then I guess that they would be at serious risk of losing their operator license. What's sad is that we used to hear of the US as the place where you couldn't have more than a five minute outage without a government investigation.

And AT&T

[Anonymous Coward]

All those ATT customers that must have froze to death trying to get a signal, trying to establish the call in the first place...