OT: How services fared during a natural disaster

[Phantasm]

I've learned a lot of things about communications/services in the past month, and since i'm sure none of these companies will want to share the results, I figured I'd put up what i've observed for anyone who's curious about how they'd be doing if there was a natural disaster. Obviously, the natural disaster was a hurricane in my case.

 

PHONES:

 

- Bellsouth wired telephones either didn't go down or were down for a short period of time.

 

- Cable TV or digital phones, forget about it. My Cox Digital Telephone still isn't w orking weeks later, and they have no idea when it will be.

 

- All cell phones crumbled the day of the storm. Sprint caved in before the storm due to call load. As of this writing, my Sprint cell phone still does not recieve calls, but it can call out. Cingular got their phones back up first from what I can tell, and Verizon wasn't far behind. Alltell was down for a very short period of time too, and the walkie talkie service didn't seem to go down much if at all and was a very reliable way to communicate. Text Messaging also didn't seem to stop working at any point.

 

CABLE:

 

- Cox has been down since the storm and has no ETA on when service will be restored.

 

- Any dish cable is working just fine. I think it's funny that Cox always had the selling point of the "unreliability" of sattelite, yet they can't seem to get themselves back up.

 

INTERNET:

 

- Bellsouth DSL is up and running. Very short outage if any in many areas.

 

- Cable Internet is down and they have no idea when it will be back.

 

I guess you don't really think about things like communication and it's easy to take it for granted, but any sort of digital service seems to crumble when there's a natural disaster.

[ezstep]

Really? Bell South, although not down, was tied up for several days. We couldn't call east (toward Jackson, MS) or south (Baton Rouge) for several days. We got the "all circuits are busy" speech and nothing else for nearly seven days. We could get through with cell phones when we couldn't get through with land lines. It took over a week to get back to normal.

 

AT&T/Cingular would work after the first two days or so (when calling east or south). We got through to my brother in Baton Rouge on Wednesday by cell phone, but not by land line.

[Phantasm]

Yeah, Baton Rouge had wierd wired phone problems. You could call local but long distance or 800 numbers had problems at points, probably due to the volume of people trying to call long distance.