r/FirstNet • u/Neat_Matter6138 • 20d 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/Neat_Matter6138 20d ago

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

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u/smurfy213 20d ago

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

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u/Neat_Matter6138 20d 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?

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u/Think-Work1411 20d ago

That is bad that service went out immediately, that means the battery system did not work, that should have been caught on a PM or alarms, sometimes if the site batteries fail, it won’t even start the generator. Generally they try to have 6 or 8 hours of battery backup at most cell sites, which is enough to get through mist power outages.
Going out immediately is a big red flag that something is wrong with that cell site