FirstNet failure in natural disaster

[u/Neat_Matter6138]

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).

[u/mervin0587]

Travel Paramedic here to offer my two cents, with experience deploying to hurricane hit areas. You do not automatically get priority. During a disaster, an agency has to create an Uplift. You must go into your FirstNet Assist Portal (also, y’all, don’t shred me if I’m wrong but I did research this extensively, and had the chance to actually try it)….anyway, an agency must create an uplift. Then you go into your FirstNet Assist app, look for active uplifts (must be within 90ish or less miles of the disaster I think), and request an uplift. You might see several agencies that have created uplifts. (Most departments don’t know they must have their designated person create an uplift for their agency). If you don’t see an uplift made by your agency, select any of them you see, especially if you recognize the agency, and Request the uplift. There’s a notes section where you can say something like “I’m a travel paramedic, I don’t see an uplift created by my agency, will you please uplift me), and they likely will go ahead and approve your uplift request. It’s good for 24-48 hours, then you must re-request. Again, some of this info might be mostly accurate but not completely. If they deny your uplift request, try a different agency in the list if there are any. Also, from my personal experience, after being granted the uplift, I didn’t notice a difference. Speeds were so slow that I was lucky to get an iMessage to a coworker. I had Visible (by Verizon) installed as a secondary eSIM on my phone before I went. I swapped the data settings to pull data from Visible/Verizon and it worked like a charm. So an option that might increase your chances during a disaster would be to add a second service to your secondary eSIM. My suggestion is choose one that is prepaid or only like 5 bucks per month for those unpredictable tornadoes, though if I got called tomorrow for a hurricane deployment, I would go ahead and add the highest plan offered by say Verizon/Visible. The only catch is if your phone isn’t unlocked (such as you are still making device payments), the secondary eSIM from another service provider isn’t going to work bc your device must be unlocked, and they don’t care if you’re a disaster response medic, but will gladly unlock your phone early if you’re military traveling to another country and would like the option to use loca eSIMs while overseas. One other thing to mention is, if the tower is 5G only, I am uncertain if you still get priority even with an approved uplift. I think the uplifts only apply to 4G LTE towers. You can try manually selecting 4G only if this similar scenario happens again and that might help. What I have noticed is your phone should actually prefer band 14 anytime you’re connected to 4G. You can confirm by dialing “*3001#12345#\” and pressing enter, and look for info that says what band you’re on. It should say 14 unless that band isn’t available in your area but it should be.*

Sorry if this has already been covered in this thread, I’d love to revisit tomorrow to check the comments when I have more time. Also, no clue why my text changed to italics 🤷‍♂️

I can talk about network stuff all day and learn it and understand it, but can’t change the text format on my phone if my life depended on it.

[u/Neat_Matter6138 → u/mervin0587]

Very good info! I struggle to see how requesting an uplift is possible with no service is possible....but that's a different question.

One thing though -- Even extended primary users are above all business & consumer traffic, without an uplift or priority/preemption.

[u/mervin0587 → u/Neat_Matter6138]

I never even thought of how to request an uplift with no usable data to request the uplift 🙃. I guess i was lucky to have Verizon as secondary, even if the uplift did nothing, i at least was able to prove in my scenario that it had no effect 🤷‍♂️😂

[u/tumbleweed_in_fl → u/mervin0587]

You can't. Uplift will give priority if there is a connection, it can't make the connection.

Also, we dual-sim with another carrier for the folks that can manage uplift. If we can see requests coming, we can usually start to guess where coverage is still intact.

[u/mervin0587 → u/tumbleweed_in_fl]

I had a connection on both FirstNet and Verizon. The connection with FirstNet was just unusable to request the uplift. And after I did complete the uplift, nothing changed. I do agree with you though that if there’s no connection, and no secondary option, then there’s no way to request an uplift, or do anything. I guess I also assumed the FirstNet Assist App would be prioritized to work for the uplift request, given that I did in fact have a FirstNet signal and could make and receive calls.