The cellular industry is questioning its reliance on the nation’s electric grid after last month’s massive blackout, which outlasted the backup power reserves of many cell phone transmission sites. A dozen hours into the blackout, nearly a third of cell sites in areas affected by the blackout were knocked out, Kathryn Condello, a vice president with the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association, said Monday. A full day into the outage, wireless firms had restored some of the sites but 23 percent still were shut down.
CELLULAR PROVIDERS had prepared for more localized and shorter power outages, but the blackout that began on Aug. 14 was “just huge and far beyond anything we had experienced in the past,” Condello said. She spoke at a meeting of a Federal Communications Commission advisory committee formed to study ways to prepare communications systems for a terrorist attack or natural disaster.
After some cell sites exhausted their batteries, which typically run no longer than four hours, wireless companies sent teams to restore power or redirected calls to nearby sites that still worked, Condello said. Nearly all the sites were restored 40 hours after the blackout began.
Many people got busy signals early in the blackout because a surge of calls clogged networks, she said. Wireless call volume during the first three hours of the blackout at times spiked to five times normal.
“Now that the unthinkable has happened, the wireless sector is actively reviewing its assumptions about the electrical sector,” Condello said. She would not speculate on what the industry would do, since the precise cause of the blackout hasn’t been determined.
“In times of crisis like this we’re going to see an ever-growing increase-in-demand spikes on the wireless network,” FCC Chairman Michael Powell said. He said the cellular industry should be preparing for this kind of emergency demand because, increasingly, when something goes wrong a person’s “first impulse is to start reaching for that cell phone.”
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