I did not have SOS service on my phone for about 6 hours yesterday. So you are incorrect in that all people were able to contact emergency services. ATT, Upper Midwest
Did you actually dial 911? Because if you tried dialing 911 and it didn’t go through, that’s a problem. ALL phones must be able to dial 911, even without service. If the phone can hit a tower, it can call 911.
Towers aren’t specific to any single phone company, if you stop paying for your phone service entirely, you can still dial 911. It just hits off the nearest tower.
I was under the impression that a company (AT&T) owns the tower, and they can lease out connections from that tower to other providers. They are also required by law to route 911 calls for free, but I can see a scenario if they botched the routing where 911 would not be accessible from that tower.
They don’t always own the tower. Like everything in America, another company fronts the cost, att pays them for tower use. And the other carriers. It’s a business model.
Correct. I had to connect to WiFi to use ATT calls over WiFi to call the non emergency number to be transferred to my needed emergency services. My local news station put out an announcement about ATT customers not being able to contact local 911 operators. May have had something to do with my county specifically. Still, a major issues.
If that’s true, that’s wack. There’s no reason that the one phone company’s service issue should have affected your phone’s ability to call 911. Towers aren’t company specific so it doesn’t make sense that there would be interference 🤔 someone fucked up
There’s call routes and service monitoring involved.
Call routing still has to happen to get you to 911. Service monitoring still happens to try directing your 911 call to another 911 dispatch center. If those two functions are broke, you get nothing no matter what.
From what I have read, I suspect that you might live in an area that took so long to get 2G that 3G essentially leapfrogged it for you. Emergency services run on 2G a lot of the time, and I don’t think any reports of 2G service being out.
Possible. All I know is calling 911 on my phone with cell only failed mid morning yesterday EST while I had no service. My local news put out an announcement the 911 operators were having issues receiving calls due to issues with ATT.
Connecting to WiFi to call 911 failed. Again, could be my county. Called non emergency local number over WiFi: success. They transferred me to 911
I did not have SOS service on my phone for about 6 hours yesterday. So you are incorrect in that all people were able to contact emergency services. ATT, Upper Midwest
Did you actually dial 911? Because if you tried dialing 911 and it didn’t go through, that’s a problem. ALL phones must be able to dial 911, even without service. If the phone can hit a tower, it can call 911.
Doesn’t That tower still need to route the call to 911? And if that routing is broken the call wouldn’t go through…I think?
Towers aren’t specific to any single phone company, if you stop paying for your phone service entirely, you can still dial 911. It just hits off the nearest tower.
I was under the impression that a company (AT&T) owns the tower, and they can lease out connections from that tower to other providers. They are also required by law to route 911 calls for free, but I can see a scenario if they botched the routing where 911 would not be accessible from that tower.
They don’t always own the tower. Like everything in America, another company fronts the cost, att pays them for tower use. And the other carriers. It’s a business model.
Correct. I had to connect to WiFi to use ATT calls over WiFi to call the non emergency number to be transferred to my needed emergency services. My local news station put out an announcement about ATT customers not being able to contact local 911 operators. May have had something to do with my county specifically. Still, a major issues.
If that’s true, that’s wack. There’s no reason that the one phone company’s service issue should have affected your phone’s ability to call 911. Towers aren’t company specific so it doesn’t make sense that there would be interference 🤔 someone fucked up
It’s not always about towers and signal.
There’s call routes and service monitoring involved.
Call routing still has to happen to get you to 911. Service monitoring still happens to try directing your 911 call to another 911 dispatch center. If those two functions are broke, you get nothing no matter what.
From what I have read, I suspect that you might live in an area that took so long to get 2G that 3G essentially leapfrogged it for you. Emergency services run on 2G a lot of the time, and I don’t think any reports of 2G service being out.
Possible. All I know is calling 911 on my phone with cell only failed mid morning yesterday EST while I had no service. My local news put out an announcement the 911 operators were having issues receiving calls due to issues with ATT.
Connecting to WiFi to call 911 failed. Again, could be my county. Called non emergency local number over WiFi: success. They transferred me to 911