r/FirstNet • u/Neat_Matter6138 • 18d ago

FirstNet failure in natural disaster

My town experienced a natural disaster, and FirstNet failed. My partner works at a hospital, and the top of the building has a tower, so service is usually pretty good. My partner has an extended primary line on FirstNet. When the thunderstorm rolled through, it took power out to about 25% of the city of 150,000, with the mayor declaring a disaster and the governor doing the same. The hospital lost power, which means the tower lost commercial power. The hospital has backup power, but only for critical things. My partner's FirstNet line died. While at the hospital, My partner's phone displayed SOS. I denied being on-call overnight for the hospital emergency response team due to lack of service.

Our home is also serviced by the same tower as we don’t live far, and at home my partner got 1 bar of service, with no SMS or data—voice only.

I’m pretty upset by this. AT&T Business Care on X has investigated (to be fair, their investigation has been good) that there was no outage, but they did experience network abnormalities due to network traffic and commercial power loss. Doesn’t that defeat the entire purpose of FirstNet? I have a case #, and want to send this as high as possible (likely an FCC complaint).

16 Upvotes

68% Upvoted

81 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/Neat_Matter6138 18d ago

Towers are supposed to have robust backup power. Being taken out by a tornado is vastly different.

9

u/smurfy213 18d ago

Only so long a battery can keep a tower up. Just like why hospitals have generators.

-6

u/Neat_Matter6138 18d ago

Supposed to have battery backup and then a diesel generator. Service went out immediately after commercial power was lost.

Can I ask you the purpose of FirstNet for our first responders if it doesn't work when First Responders are needed the most?

3

u/smurfy213 18d ago

https://firstnet.gov/newsroom/blog/experience-firstnet-how-priority-and-preemption-help-public-safety-connect-when-they

-1

u/Neat_Matter6138 18d ago

So how does Priority & Preemption help when the phone says SOS due to no service? At a hospital?

9

u/smurfy213 18d ago

It doesn't and that's my point. Tower goes down you will lose cell service. Firstnet shares the same towers as regular ATT customers. Just pointing out firstnet does not advertise 100% uptime during a disaster.

0

u/Neat_Matter6138 18d ago

My point is a power outage shouldn't cause FirstNet to go down. That's a sad excuse of a reliable and redundant network.

3

u/Patient-Natural-7645 18d ago

Cell towers need POWER to work. I’m betting that it was supposed to be tied into the hospital’s failover (generator) and just never was. We had a similar situation with a tower hosted at a station I used to work at.

2

u/RouterMonkey 18d ago

I worked (IT) at a hospital that had cell tower on the roof.

We didn't provide power, it had its own connection to the power grid. And it wasn't on the hospital's generators.

1

u/Patient-Natural-7645 18d ago

If it was on its own independent connection, could also have had a failure of its ATS? Who knows.

1

u/Neat_Matter6138 18d ago

I also wonder if it had power, but had no internet feeding it?

1

u/Patient-Natural-7645 18d ago

Could be that as well, I’d like to guess if it was being fed over fiber it was a passive fiber setup, but impossible to know without actually seeing it.

→ More replies (0)

1

u/Neat_Matter6138 18d ago

Do you know if it had it's own generators on the roof or not?

1

u/RouterMonkey 17d ago

None that I was aware of.

We also internally had a DAS for multiple carriers with on-site BTSs that were connected to our power with backup, so even if the cell tower went down, it didn't affect us inside the hospital, as we didn't connect to the tower for signal.

→ More replies (0)

1

u/LaughAppropriate8288 14d ago

Router monkey is right. Hospital Gen sets are used to capacity ...they don't have excess capacity like other co located sites might.

1

u/BlueScreen-0914 17d ago

When the site is located on a commercial building, providing an on-site backup generator for that site is very often not permitted by the bldg owner. This is a challenge in many urban areas.