How Did Yesterday’s Massive AT&T Service Outage Impact First Responders – and What Can We Learn?
By Matt Sloane
While tens of hundreds of American AT&T customers complained about not having the ability to order their Starbucks ahead of time, or losing their every day login streak on Candy Crush, there was a much more concerning issue yesterday in my mind — what does the lack of cell service do to our public safety drone operators’ ability to fly and reply to calls?
911 centers across the country reported extra high call volume, mostly as a result of people calling in to “be sure that 911 worked,” but largely, public safety agencies using AT&T services were operating on “FirstNet” circuits, slightly than the general public AT&T circuits.
FirstNet is a separate cellular network built specifically for public safety and emergency response providers; in order that in a case where public cell circuits are overloaded or down, first responders can still communicate.
Yesterday can have been the most important test yet for FirstNet, which also happens to be run by AT&T; and based on the anecdotes I received from a lot of our clients and friends, it worked just wonderful!
That’s the excellent news.
The bad news is that any civilian among the many 70,000+ AT&T subscribers affected by yesterday’s outage would have had no technique to call or text 911 in the event that they weren’t near WiFi.
So what affect did this have on the nation’s public safety drone operators? Apparently not much.
In my unofficial survey, most agencies reported that while their civilian AT&T cell phones were having problems, their FirstNet devices – each phones and hotspots utilized in drone response – gave the impression to be operating normally.
Much more helpful were the suggestions I got back from a number of of those folks about the best way to prevent an outage like this from affecting operations.
Many talked of using hotspots with SIM cards from multiple operators – 1 AT&T, 1 Verizon, 1 T-Mobile, just in case one in every of the three went down – and a number of have also invested in Starlink’s satellite web service in case a disaster here on earth took out multiple networks.
Overall, word on the road appears to be that the system worked as designed, and the outages were merely an inconvenience for many individuals; however it proved to be a great exercise for our nation’s public safety agencies to see in a real-world scenario how their training and preparation stands up under adversarial conditions.
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