Is your cell phone service down?

[luv]

I like a certain restaurant on Facebook, and they posted earlier that, if you're one of 10 million people without cell phone service, and you go in and tell them the name of your carrier, you'll get 10% off your order.

Then, I overhear an attorney on the phone saying that he and his wife's cell phones both stopped working simultaneously. They're on AT&T.

Anyone else having this problem, or is it just a local thing? Like maybe a cell tower down?

[GoShox]

I'm on AT&T. Last night I was out on the other side of town and the roads were pretty slick here in Wichita, apparently there was a massive wreck near my house and my friends and family were texting me and calling me over and over again to see if I was ok. Unfortunately, my phone wasn't getting any texts or calls, but I was able to access the internet just fine. Eventually I got everything at once at like 1 AM.

Hadn't heard of this problem until last night, but seems like a lot of people are experiencing it.

[Dayze]

Originally Posted by GoShox

I'm on AT&T. Last night I was out on the other side of town and the roads were pretty slick here in Wichita, apparently there was a massive wreck near my house and my friends and family were texting me and calling me over and over again to see if I was ok. Unfortunately, my phone wasn't getting any texts or calls, but I was able to access the internet just fine. Eventually I got everything at once at like 1 AM.

Hadn't heard of this problem until last night, but seems like a lot of people are experiencing it.

most likely the voice TDM T1s were down, but EVDO T1 was still up and able to get to the NIU and 3G cabinet/BTS..

[redfan]

First time in 4 years I've had an outage. Happened a lot w/Sprint.

[Lzen]

Originally Posted by Dayze

most likely the voice TDM T1s were down, but EVDO T1 was still up and able to get to the NIU and 3G cabinet/BTS..

[Dayze]

Originally Posted by oldman

That's not completely true. It depends on what you're doing. I have "just a little experience" in the field.
As for AT&T's problem yesterday, there's only about 3 things that could have happened and 2 of them are highly unlikely.
Before we get into a disagreement about Sprint having the fewest outages, remember that both AT&T and Verizon have to report all FCC outages, not just cellular. Sprint doesn't serve any landline based customers, but AT&T and Verizon do. I don't remember the exact critera for a reportable outage, but part of it is anything that effects more than 30K subscribers. Sprint does serve some customers for data and such via fiber, but the likelihood for that to fail to the point of an outage reportable to the FCC is pretty slim.

yeah; just saying we insert all routers/Radio shelves, and perfom all cabinet hot swaps and backhaul converstion to Fiber at night during the customer impacting/network window (1am-5am) because we take down the legacy side in order to perform the work.

there are definitely impacts/consequences from a 911 standpoint if 911 hasn't been tested//approved then you're hosed post-migration. we do all our 911 testing and check for alarms prior to switching over to the new Samsung equipment / 3G/4G so there are no issues /consequences bringing up a site or sector that is failing 911.

I can't remember the FCC impacts etc if a cell site goes down....hmm. other than a huge firedrill on my end lol.

[Dayze]

Originally Posted by Lzen

depending on the size of the cell site, and how much customer traffic, there can be multiple T1s from the Digital cross connect. say you have 4 T1s; 3 could be allocated for voice, and 1 for data (EVDO).

so you could still get EVDO if that particular T1 hasn't gone down etc, while still having no voice connectivity on the other 3

Fiber (4G, which also can handle 3G), however, removes this; and voice and Data can be adjusted remotely at the core router level based on traffic on that particular tower. They divide Voice and Data via different light level frequencies in the fiber; rather than an 'either/ or" scenario with copper (T1s)