No service during hurricane sandy [ Edited ]

[Conthiii]

I had no service during hurricane sandy for about 5 days and I wish to terminate my contract without paying fees. I could not communicate with family or browse internet for news. 

[kdfederer ACE - Wizard]

Act of God does not release you from your contract obligations.
If you wish to terminate your contract, you will pay the fee.
You can ask for a credit for the days without service.

[AnnB1211]

So, you want to cancel service because of the hurricane?

[harryspar]

It isn't going to work. It takes a lot more than a 5 day outage to warrant escaping the ETF.

You probably can get some credit.

[wingrider01 ACE - Geek]

---

harryspar wrote:

It isn't going to work. It takes a lot more than a 5 day outage to warrant escaping the ETF.

You probably can get some credit.

---

Depends on the outage - in this case it is not valid, acts of god and nature do not qualify

[DogDaddy]

You actually expect to have service during a hurricane? There was no electricity; are you going to call the utility company to cancel having electrical power to your home? I bet there was no Verizon coverage either, or Virgin Mobile or Sprint or T-Mobile or any other coverage.

Should your boss fire you for not coming to work during the hurricane?

[ibSteve]

Yes I do. Verizon and Sprint had service, why not AT&T?? From what I understand Verison had a higher level of preparedness with larger capacity generators at towers. Now the sillyness. I went into an AT&T customer center to ask why we had no service in the west village and Verizon did and was told it was because Verizon uses satellites and AT&T uses towers that had their power out. 

[hydrogen3]

""Sattelites"!?!

[ibSteve]

Sattelites, yeah you never heard of that? That's that new technology that Verizon uses... even had the AT&T people spell it for me. Actually that was courtesy of the spellchecker on the AT&T site.It must've been affected by Sandy also.

[harryspar]

Satellites?! Uh uh.

[DogDaddy]

You are being unrealistic and unreasonable.

[wingrider01 ACE - Geek]

---

ibSteve wrote:

Yes I do. Verizon and Sprint had service, why not AT&T?? From what I understand Verison had a higher level of preparedness with larger capacity generators at towers. Now the sillyness. I went into an AT&T customer center to ask why we had no service in the west village and Verizon did and was told it was because Verizon uses satellites and AT&T uses towers that had their power out. 

---

Sorry Verizon does not, they still utilize towers. For a cell phone to be able to access a geosynchronous communications satellite it requires a different radio infrastructure and costs per minute are a lot higher then what you want to pay. In addition communication to a satellite requires LOS - Line of Site from the phone to the satellite. Verizon and sprint had service in limited locations for the simple reasons their towers what not has heavily affected as the other carriers

While they do have emergency command centers that allow routing of 911 style cell traffic just like the other carriers do, they are not for john doe usage and only for first responders. Numerous att, verizon and sprint towers where out of service simpley because of lack of power to run the fuel pumps for the generators located at the major tower sites.

Suspect that you are confusing things with this Verizon offering - utilizes special devices

http://www.vzwsatellite.com/

[ibSteve]

I was not confusing anything. Please read my post more carefully. I prefaced my statement with "Now the sillyness." Of course Verison does not use satellite technology for regular users.

---

wingrider01 wrote:

---

ibSteve wrote:

Yes I do. Verizon and Sprint had service, why not AT&T?? From what I understand Verison had a higher level of preparedness with larger capacity generators at towers. Now the sillyness. I went into an AT&T customer center to ask why we had no service in the west village and Verizon did and was told it was because Verizon uses satellites and AT&T uses towers that had their power out. 

---

Sorry Verizon does not, they still utilize towers. For a cell phone to be able to access a geosynchronous communications satellite it requires a different radio infrastructure and costs per minute are a lot higher then what you want to pay. In addition communication to a satellite requires LOS - Line of Site from the phone to the satellite. Verizon and sprint had service in limited locations for the simple reasons their towers what not has heavily affected as the other carriers

While they do have emergency command centers that allow routing of 911 style cell traffic just like the other carriers do, they are not for john doe usage and only for first responders. Numerous att, verizon and sprint towers where out of service simpley because of lack of power to run the fuel pumps for the generators located at the major tower sites.

Suspect that you are confusing things with this Verizon offering - utilizes special devices

http://www.vzwsatellite.com/

---

[F-A-t-t-lies]

I personally find your replies in this thread, as well as, Att's failure to support it's customers effected by Hurricane Sandy, to be dismissive and  reprehensible business practice. Whether or not satellites are used by Verizon is moot and does not justify AT&T's failure to support a very large customer base during this crisis. The fact remains that AT&T failed and continues to fail in delivering serivce to the areas impacted by the storm. You are correct in that cellular technology utilizes a network of towers as the primary means of distributing its service, regardless of carrier. What is interesting is your dismissiveness also highlights very real problems in AT&T's network. 

1. AT&T does not have the breadth of tower coverage as Verizon in the affected areas. What does this mean? There is no granularity to Atts network.  Lose a tower, impact a significant portion of their coverage area. Although a significant portion of the area lost power, this demonstrates , AT&T does not have a dense enough network to support multiple tower failures.  Note: This could also be evidence to show why AT&Ts coverage in Nj is adequate at best.

2. AT&t's emergency preparedness failed miserably. Even with catastrophic tower failures, there was no recognizable action by AT&T to keep their towers operational even at a basic level of functioning. Evidence? AT&T sent out an automated text to customers 4 days AFTER the storm. The text stated  AT&T was closely monitoring their wireless networks and had crews out to repair damage. A press release on Nov. 5 also stated that nearly 93% of the network was operational. Because of Atts hard work or because ironically their netowrk coverage mirrored the percentage of areas with restored power. What did AT&T have to do other than wait for power to be restored to the tower servers?  The question still remains why did Verizon maintain basic service to its customers And AT&T did not.

Dogdaddy, "you actually expect to have service during a hurricane?" Is a completely ignorant statement. the answer is Yes customers are accustomed to functional cellular service (or plenty of dropped calls in AT&Ts case). 99% don't understand or care how their service works it just does. Of course from Atts point of view, one should not expect cellular service to work during such a catastrophic event. but where was Att to educate or inform customers? no reassurance. no reponse. no network. ATT has done nothing.. I hope you realize people relied on AT&T to contact family, work or even Att to express how happy they are with their service. And even more so, the nor'easter on Wednesday cut power to many remarkably cutting cellular service yet  again to many who had power restored.

[Edited to comply with Guidelines]

[harryspar]

After Katrina, the FCC proposed rules requiring all cell towers to have generators and adequate fuel.

ATT sued, lobbied, and stalled to prevent the rule from being implemented.

According to industry spokesman CHRIS GUTTMAN-MCCABE: "Having sort of a rigid rule removes the carrier's ability to be flexible and to relocate resources in the event of a storm like Hurricane Sandy."

A transparent load of lobbyist corporate baloney.

Source: http://m.npr.org/news/Technology/164080605?textSize=small

[F-A-t-t-lies]

Great transcript from the NPR report. Again another piece of evidence to show ATT's blatant disregard for its customer base. Not surprisingly, ATT accepted a payment from me during the outage ironically failing to deliver its service. Why wouldn't ATT want to establish a backup power source for their towers?? Too costly? Will profit margins fall too low?? I guess it's a good thing for ATT customers because if are required to setup a backup then we will see an additional charge on our bills. I wouldn't even mind if the line item said, "Backup Tower fee" but it would mostly likely be titled as some "recovery fee" 

Thanks for nothing ATT you throttle data, remove lower tiered messaging options, continually drop calls,, increasing pricing options, fail to respond to technical customer service questions and now fail to backup your service towers during a crisis while suing not to have to do it???

Of course you have the option of changing carriers but at a hefty cost to the consumer. Where is the regulation??? 

[wingrider01 ACE - Geek]

---

harryspar wrote:
After Katrina, the FCC proposed rules requiring all cell towers to have generators and adequate fuel.

ATT sued, lobbied, and stalled to prevent the rule from being implemented.

According to industry spokesman CHRIS GUTTMAN-MCCABE: "Having sort of a rigid rule removes the carrier's ability to be flexible and to relocate resources in the event of a storm like Hurricane Sandy."

A transparent load of lobbyist corporate baloney.

Source: http://m.npr.org/news/Technology/164080605?textSize=small

---

you need to look at the term "adequte fuel and generators" cell towers all have generators, as far as adequete fuel is concerned, the standard ruel si enough fuel ti run 24 hours continous, power is STILL out in locations, FUEL is in very short supply, stands to common sense that generators will run dry if they can't be refueled becasue theis is NO fuel available or it is not possible to get a fuel truck to the location to refill the generator's tank.

Love that last statement - "Having sort of a rigid rule removes the carrier's ability to be flexible and to relocate resources in the event of a storm like Hurricane Sandy." - just how exactly do they expect to be able to "relocate" a cell tower in the event of a storm? Kind of difficult to easily move a 200 foot high tower and all of it's support equipment - maybe 30 or 40 tonnes 0 unles you ahve a way of doing this

[harryspar]

@wingrider If I'm not mistaken only the standalone towers have generators, but the antennas that are put up on existing buildings and some other structures do not. In some areas that's most of the available antennas, which means the network goes down the second power goes out.The FCC wanted to mandate that all cell antennas have backup power. I don't work in telecom so I might be making a mistake.

[wingrider01 ACE - Geek]

---

harryspar wrote:
@wingrider If I'm not mistaken only the standalone towers have generators, but the antennas that are put up on existing buildings and some other structures do not. In some areas that's most of the available antennas, which means the network goes down the second power goes out.The FCC wanted to mandate that all cell antennas have backup power. I don't work in telecom so I might be making a mistake.

---

The buildiing one of my offices in the southwest rents space for a booster tower has a genset on it, most of thetransciever locations I have toured all have genset backup also. Simple fact is - a multitude of commercial enterprises where shutodwn becasue of sandy for the simple reason the gensets where flooded or under water, pretty hard for a combustion engine to run when it is under 10 feet of water.

A close friends business in New Jersy is still under limited usage, the co-locs genset was under water, she got her online retail site back up by physically having people get the servers from the original location and move them to another facility that was not under water or flooded.

Bottom line - gensets mean squat when there is no fuel available or they are under water. Whatever man can build - mither nature can destroy. The goverment can mandate anything their little hert desires, but actually mandating that it work under a situation like the superstorm is ludicous. All it does is gives teh goverment the chance to beat on the chest and pat themsevles on the back for "fixing" the problem with a few words and no physical action

[F-A-t-t-lies]

Julius Genachowski, the F.C.C. chairman stated in a press conference on October 31st that tower have battery backups. His statement wasnt specific to ATT but it seems plausible. I am not in telecommunications and no nothing of the way towers are powered but even if they have generators, I know from first hand experience that when I lost power, my cell service immediately failed. Again this points to ATT's lack of preparedness because the generators should have worked--if they had fuel--if they turned on. Four days later when I received power back, cell service came right along with it. Yet again, I lost power after the nor'easter hit on Wednesday and immediately following suit the cell service failed. 

I understand no company can completely plan for a catastrophic event like this but why did Verizon maintain better coverage. The FCC reported Verizon lost only 6 percent of their coverage in the Northeast. Better preparedness??? I'm still without cell service and now I see this, 

Nov. 8, 2012 1:18 p.m. ET

Network Status Update

As of today, 99 percent of our sites are up and running across the region impacted by Sandy.

It stinks to be in the 1 percent. Again Thanks ATT. BTW where are my reassuring text messages you like to send?? Oh sorry I dont have cell service. Guess Ill have to wait.

also @wingrider makes some great points but areas outside of flood zones are having as many problems as those directly on the shore. Case in point, i live approximately 5 miles from the Shore. No flooding and no service. 

[ibSteve]

An interesting read. "AT&T, Verizon Phase Out Copper Networks, 'A Lifeline' After Sandy"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/09/att-verizon-sandy_n_2094302.html?1352491623

[wingrider01 ACE - Geek]

---

ibSteve wrote:

An interesting read. "AT&T, Verizon Phase Out Copper Networks, 'A Lifeline' After Sandy"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/09/att-verizon-sandy_n_2094302.html?1352491623

---

POTS service has always been the most reliable, but the infrastructure is expensive to build and even more expensive to maintain as compared to a tower or fiber.

What that article does not make understood - this will not happen in the near future, it will take at least 10 to 15 years and billions of dollars for the carriers to get fiber in the locations in place of copper.  The rules have changed in stringing cable, back when the copper was(and still is) king they could stick a pole up and run a cable, now they are required to bury them which brings in a whole new gambit of regulations and rights of way. Cities and muncipalties are no longer allowing utility companies, cable compaies and phone companies to string it on poles

[21stNow]

---

ibSteve wrote:

An interesting read. "AT&T, Verizon Phase Out Copper Networks, 'A Lifeline' After Sandy"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/09/att-verizon-sandy_n_2094302.html?1352491623

---

I fall into that group of people whose copper service is compromised by heavy flooding (read: anything more than moderate rain).  I also heard that line from Verizon myself about not repairing copper lines anymore.  This catches people between a rock and a hard place.  I'm willing to pay for landline service, but the provider isn't willing to maintain it.  While I wasn't in NY, I've been in the DC area during the smaller effects of Sandy, the derecho in June, last year's earthquake and many other concerns.  My cell phone service was never worse than my landline service and most times was better.

[christopherjones]

Without the customers, AT&T wouldn't be in business. To think that AT&T does not care about their customers is simply ludacris. That is why they do surveys, to see what their customers think and how they can improve. Simple as that.

As for the towers, it's a hard subject. Of course AT&T wants 110% uptime on their towers... who doesn't.

Having backup generators and fuel for several days for millions of cell phone towers would be costly. Especially in a one in a lifetime event! I don't feel it'd be worth the cost, but anyway, that's just my opinion on the subject.

---

Random thought:  Maybe having cell phone towers powered solar panels might actually be a more reliable, more efficient, and cheaper way to provide cell service.

Now back to the original purpose of this topic:

No they will not allow you to terminate your contract with out an ETF.

[wilcre ACE - Expert]

this all brings me back to that in September sometime after midnight on the 10th of some year... My phone doesnt work, where you located, New York...... You are all alive and well, other people not so lucky, in excess of 110 deceased, in excess of 40,000 lost their homes... Cell phones are toys and I personally say a Luxury and nothing more.

[ibSteve]

So who gives out these ACE Awards? Things getting really weird. Animations and moral thumping. The issue here is did AT&T do a proper job or should we (you) be looking for another provider. I personally thought that although networks would be congested and some, or many calls would fail, I would still have some service in an emergency. I was wrong....at least with AT&T. Maybe bad luck for AT&T this time but Verison had service. Maybe not next time.

[Conthiii]

Actually everybody but att had coverage.

[ibSteve]

No, T-Mobile did not. Probably shared towers. Actually T-Mobile was worse. When my service (AT&T) was restored a coworker on T-Mobile did not have his.

Also AT&T has little coverage in Bellevue Hospital. Verizon had much better. Asked a doctor where I could get a signal with AT&T his answer was "good luck." 

[wingrider01 ACE - Geek]

---

christopherjones wrote:

Without the customers, AT&T wouldn't be in business. To think that AT&T does not care about their customers is simply ludacris. That is why they do surveys, to see what their customers think and how they can improve. Simple as that.

As for the towers, it's a hard subject. Of course AT&T wants 110% uptime on their towers... who doesn't.

Having backup generators and fuel for several days for millions of cell phone towers would be costly. Especially in a one in a lifetime event! I don't feel it'd be worth the cost, but anyway, that's just my opinion on the subject.

---

Random thought:  Maybe having cell phone towers powered solar panels might actually be a more reliable, more efficient, and cheaper way to provide cell service.

Now back to the original purpose of this topic:

No they will not allow you to terminate your contract with out an ETF.

---

as long as it is sunny during a super storm you solar panel idea would work - but then the high winds would probalby tear them off the towers. Add to the fact the amount of power that cell towers and their support equipment require would need a solar panel array that would require a tremendous amount of space and be one of the first things that is destroyed in a super storm 

Don;t kid yourself that with the comment about "AT&T would not be in business", cellular communications is just a small portion of the AT&T business line, their portfollio of different business lines are very diverse and stable

[wingrider01 ACE - Geek]

---

Conthiii wrote:

Actually everybody but att had coverage.

---

wrong, my people in that area on sprint and verizon had no communications at all in the aftermath of the storm