AT&T is giving customers a $5 credit for its cellphone outage. Some angry customers say it’s not enough.::AT&T announced a $5 credit toward a future phone bill and said it “let down many of our customers” as a result of the outage.
AT&T is giving customers a $5 credit for its cellphone outage. Some angry customers say it’s not enough.::AT&T announced a $5 credit toward a future phone bill and said it “let down many of our customers” as a result of the outage.
I’d say that’s fair for a service that isn’t the backbone of emergency services, like TV, or even internet.
Not having phones in an emergency is a different ballgame. I feel like the FCC should have laws about cellphone uptime.
Did emergency services not work? My phone said “SOS Only”, which I assume would mean I could make 911 calls if I needed to.
FirstNet was down on top of regular cell service. It’s not your ability to call 911, it’s how devices inside fire trucks for example connect to the internet and receive information, how volunteer firemen receive digital pages, etc.
That sounds worse.
Well I’ll tell you one thing, there’s always a lot of discourse on why firehouses in the U.S. still use a siren when digital paging exists. This is why.
From my understanding, SOS only means the phone has signal to a tower that isn’t in network, but will honor emergency calls.
My local police made an announcement telling people to stop calling 911 to test their phones, so it worked, at least here.
But that was just 1 network, no? You could still carry out emergency phone calls over other cell networks. Or does that not work in U.S.?
Emergency calls in both Europe and the US operate on the same cellular network. And pretty much all of the world that has cell service. Emergency numbers like 112 or 911 just get prioritization in the event of overloading/poor signal/etc.
In Europe, though, AML would send a GPS signal out which would alert emergency services of your failed attempt to call and your location. Not exactly a phone network, but I guess a “separate network” if we’re being technical.