At 16 Jul 2007 06:44:55 -0400 George wrote:

> The old ATT TDMA sites that are going/gone away had backup generators.
> The GSM sites just have a minimal amount of battery. So with anything
> other than a short term power failure you aren't calling 911 (or
> anyone else) on your iphone.


If any other GSM carrier is operating (like T-Mobile) the 911 call would
go through them.

And forgetting the doom and gllom scenarios, backup batteries are good
for several hours- longer than than Vast majority of power outages. In
this post-Katrina world, AT&T has decided to spend their "backup"
resources on things like an increased number of COWs (Cells on Wheels,)
stored regionally, to deploy to areas in a true state of emergency,
rather than try to increase backup capacity of every cell tower in their
network.

In my nearly 20-years of using cellphones, I've never lost service due to
power outages- even in outages lasting for over two-days. I suspect the
cellcos know what they're doing in that area by now!



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