Tornado Disrupts Cellphone Service
May 21, 2013
Tornado Disrupts Cellphone Service
Hundreds of residents around Oklahoma City and its suburbs struggled to communicate Tuesday after a huge tornado tore through the area and caused widespread disruptions of cellphone and Internet service.
Wireless providers urged residents to communicate via text message to save bandwidth that was overwhelmed by a spike in call volume after the storm, which destroyed schools, a hospital and entire neighborhoods, especially in the hard-hit suburb of Moore.
Sprint customers are experiencing blocked phones calls after the tornado damaged three cell sites, according to Sprint spokeswoman Crystal Davis, and are being encouraged to rely on text messaging.
“Customers in the area might have to make a second or third attempt to complete a call, and we’re asking them to use text messaging versus voice as the recovery and response efforts continue,” Davis told The Huffington Post.
Wireless providers declined to estimate how many customers have been affected by the outages or how long it would take to restore service. Sprint, Verizon and AT&T said they are deploying temporary cell towers to expand wireless capacity in the area and setting up stations to charge cellphones.
Sprint and AT&T also said they are waiving voice, data and text overage charges through June 30 for customers in the affected areas.
T-Mobile spokeswoman Heidi Merz said the company’s wireless network is “more than 97 percent operational” in the affected area. “We are making steady improvements with a small cluster of cell sites that was damaged more than others,” she added.
Wireless providers have faced criticism after service has been repeatedly unavailable or jammed during and after major storms. For example, cell service was unavailable for several days in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy last year, when the storm knocked out power in several cities.
Critics have said wireless providers should be required to have backup power at cell towers in the event of sustained power outages. But industry representatives have resisted such rules. They say their networks are resilient, but are not equipped to handle long power outages or massive spikes in call volume that occur during emergencies.