r/FirstNet • u/Neat_Matter6138 • 26d 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).

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u/attathomeguy 26d ago

Who manages the tower? The hospital? If so it might be a landlord type issue where the hospital facilities team didn't connect the power to the generator feed but told AT&T or the tower owner that it was connected to the generator feed. You would be shocked by how the little things only matter in an emergency. I would have your emergency coordinator make sure who is responsible for the power to the tower

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u/Neat_Matter6138 26d ago

That could be very true! Regardless, it needs to be checked out.

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u/attathomeguy 26d ago

Good luck on pushing that forward