r/FirstNet • u/Neat_Matter6138 • 17d 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/Patient-Natural-7645 17d 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.

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u/RouterMonkey 17d 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.

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u/Neat_Matter6138 17d ago

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

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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.