Why Cell Phones Too?
Posted November 9, 2013 at 5:18 am by Tim Dustrude
I ran into Mike Greene from Rock Island Technology Solutions at the store yesterday and told him that I am getting a lot of people asking me why cell phones are not working because of a problem with a land line. He said that the Verizon tower here in Friday Harbor connects to… well you guessed it… the very same fiber optic cable that is causing all the trouble. So if you’ve noticed your cell phone (Verizon) works sometimes, but not always it’s because it is attempting to connect to the the cell tower on Mt. Constitution over on Orcas, and that tower cannot handle all the traffic from the county all at once – so sometimes you get a call through and sometimes not.
Texting on the other hand requires far less bandwidth, so most texts should go through sooner or later. As far as AT&T service, he wasn’t quite sure about how to answer that – if anyone reading this knows, please feel free to hit the comment button below and shed some light for all the rest of us technotards so we can hava understandings too. đŸ˜‰
Mike did say that Verizon is on the ball, getting an additional dish set up on the tower near the Rock Island building, and another out at Roche (these are up now) and next they just need to put receiving dishes on the tower at Mt. Constitution, get them all aimed correctly and they should have much better service going forward. It wasn’t clear to me if this will be a temporary or permanent solution.
And finally the other thing he said was that they (Rock Island) have installed another repeater on 2nd Street so there is now great WiFi coverage on both Court Street and now over towards Key Bank. This is a free access point. And from what I hear, he has lots of bandwidth so should be a good signal.
Rock-on Mike and thanks for all you’re doing during these difficult times!
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Categories: Around Here
3 comments:
3 comments...
Thanks Mike I wondered about that!
Info is spotty, but AT&T & Sprint are down as well as Verizon. AT&T has deployed portable units on three major islands, and Sprint is sending a truck that will provide, cell coverage, wireless for anyone, and even phones that residents can use short term to make critical calls. ETA for Sprint truck is today.
Overall, I’ve been pleased with response of wireless carriers- though I know we’ve still had several days at least with significant issues.
Brendan
San Juan County Department of Emergency Management
Hi, I used to be Chief Technical Officer for a cell company. Each cell site requires a connection (T-1 lines) back to the cell companies central office hence the connection problem when CenturyTel’s system went down. Although I do not know AT&T’s specific network layout I assume they do not have a site on Mt. Constitution and hence cannot easily install microwave to replace the T-1 connection. Microwave requires a specific line of site path with no obstructions.
Again without knowing Verizon’s specific implementation they used their COW (cellsite on wheels) to provide the T-1 connection to their existing cellsites from Mt. Constitution.
Short but hopefully a somewhat clear explanation.
Dave Aas
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