Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Re: Landlines stay up, cell phones go down in NE power failure....

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sat, 16 Aug 2003 23:35:59 -0400

------- Original Message --------
From: Joey Gottlieb <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: Landlines stay up, cell phones go down in NE power failure.....

Recently I told some of our employees and a customer that we needed a
Category 5 hurricane to come up the east coast and make landfall in NY.  It
was not because I am sadistic or some weather nut - I was simply eager for
our customers to have a little "positive reinforcement" of why their private
wireless system's are so important.  After I had made my hurricane comment
the recent issue of MRT came and my brother showed me the Nextel hurricane
ad - I looked at him and said that as long as the power was not out for more
than 4-5 hours it might work ( I have NEVER seen a generator at a Nextel
site and the tech's have told me that the batteries are good for ~ 4 hours).

Along comes Thursday at 4:15 and I start getting pages and calls on my cell
phone about power going out all over the place.  We asked all of our
employees to stay on the clock and sent many of them to strategic areas.  As
many of you know generators sometimes have a tendency not to run when they
are needed the most and our customers rely on us to "get the site up".  We
leave portable gensets at many of our sites and our critical customer sites
for just such an emergency.  We have battery plants for most of our Trunking
systems that will give us 8 hours of standby @ 100% duty - None of our key
systems went down at all.  We had one PS customer that went down due to
their Quantar and MSR-2000 not switching to battery apparently due to a low
voltage condition on their AC service.  Unplugging their equipment solved
the problem and we assisted them in getting their portable generator
operational.

We use our Trunking systems and Nextel for the operation of our business.
Nextel was overloaded almost immediately and it was impossible to get calls
through.  My Verizon cell phone worked a little better but not much.  Around
8:30PM we lost most of the Nextel sites in our area, Verizon (they have a
genset at almost every site) stayed up with network congestion issues.

We got most of our power back on Thursday night.  On Friday we contacted our
larger trunking customers to follow up on our systems operation - They all
reported no problems and were "glad" they had the Trunking radios because
their Public Network systems were "useless".  Many of our customers provide
emergency / governmental services and would have had big problems without
communications.

We also learned some valuable lessons for our own operation.  This was
certainly an extraordinary event and we were basically prepared.  I would
encourage all of the PWF readers to review their own disaster plans.  We are
always preaching disaster preparedness to our customers and we could have
been better prepared.  Our computer systems shutdown automatically as
planned.  Our phone system died 45 minutes faster then we anticipated and in
our last phone upgrade we removed the analog phones that were ahead of the
PBX - We ran the PBX from an inverter in a truck and then call forwarded the
phones to the answering service. The "old fashioned" phones will be
reinstalled next week. 

Our biggest problem was the Tech's in our Northern Counties communicating
with the office.  Our office can't access our trunking systems in many of
the Counties that we service due to terrain.  We will be installing the Link
Communications TCB that we bought to "play" with to connect our northern and
southern systems together next week on our shop ID.  

I guess we should have practiced what we preach - You must have control over
your own destiny.  If you rely on a public network you will get whatever
level of service the "Public" gets.  Unfortunately that level of service is
not always good enough during an unusual event.

Regards,

Joey Gottlieb
Goosetown Communications
www.goosetown.com
www.repeaternetwork.com

------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-->
Buy Ink Cartridges or Refill Kits for Your HP, Epson, Canon or Lexmark
Printer at Myinks.com. Free s/h on orders $50 or more to the US & Canada. http://www.c1tracking.com/l.asp?cid=5511
http://us.click.yahoo.com/l.m7sD/LIdGAA/qnsNAA/61FxlB/TM
---------------------------------------------------------------------~->

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/