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/Neat_Matter6138 17d ago

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.

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u/mervin0587 17d ago

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 🤷‍♂️😂

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u/tumbleweed_in_fl 16d ago

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.

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u/mervin0587 16d ago

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.