Rick Black, a telecommunications analyst at Blaylock & Partners LP, had his cellular telephone with him in Manhattan when the electricity went out on Thursday.
He kept it off during a six-hour trip to his New Jersey home.
Black said he figured the blackout, the biggest in North American history, would render the device useless. First, a spike in the number of calls would clog the wireless networks. Then the power failure would begin to sap the backup batteries of thousands of transmission sites until they lost power altogether, leaving dozens of areas as "dead zones."
PHOTO: AP
"I don't think any of the phone companies made a plan for this," Black said.
Millions of other mobile-phone users from Detroit to New York learned that lesson. They discovered Verizon Wireless, the largest mobile-phone company, and competitors such as AT&T Wireless Services Inc, Nextel Communications Inc, and Sprint PCS Group couldn't cope with a surge in calls at the same time as a widespread power failure. Many were still unable to get full service for most of yesterday.
"I think they're going to revisit the issue to ensure their networks stay up longer," Black said.
Thousands of cellular sites, which pick up and transmit signals, switched to battery power from electricity on Thursday once the blackout began just after 4:00pm New York time. Most of the batteries died in about four hours, leaving customers across the Northeast with little or no phone coverage yesterday.
More than 75 percent of Cingular Wireless LLC's transmission towers in Detroit and Bloomfield, Michigan, were out of service yesterday.
AT&T Wireless spokesman Mark Siegel said that today there was "considerable improvement" in its service. At Verizon Wireless, which late yesterday said power failures still plagued some sites in New York, service is now nearly 100 percent in the city, according to spokesman Eric Rabe.
Cingular, the second-largest mobile-phone company, Nextel and Cingular's joint-venture partner T-Mobile sent a fleet of trailers and flat-bed trucks loaded with generators to provide power to sites in Manhattan and other affected areas.
"We're going to do some post-game analysis to see what happened with the networks and what the wireless industry can do better next time," said Travis Larson, a spokesman for the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association in Washington.
Companies can cover an area like Manhattan with as many as 1,200 sites, which can be small enough to fit in the stairways of high-rise buildings or in windows. Switches, which direct the calls from the sites, often have diesel-powered generators that can supply two days of energy.
"The only two ways to address this issue are more spectrum or an enormous increase in the number of cell sites," Larson said. The latter step would be "prohibitively expensive," he said, declining to speculate about how much.
Mobile phone companies have sliced spending. AT&T Wireless, the third-largest wireless company and the largest whose shares are publicly traded, cut its budget to US$3 billion this year from US$4.9 billion last year.
The reductions reflect increased competition that has forced the mobile-phone companies to reduce prices. Cingular, for instance, gives customers 900 minutes they can use at any time for US$39.99 a month. Two years ago, the company offered 250 minutes for the same price.
As a result, wireless providers aren't likely to boost spending, said Albert Lin, an analyst at American Technology Research.
"Carriers spend the minimum amount," Lin said. "No one is buying more battery power than they need, which can mean any hiccup can create a lot of damage immediately."
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