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ATT’s botched network update caused yesterday’s major wireless outage
(arstechnica.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Did you actually dial 911? Because if you tried dialing 911 and it didn't go through, that's a problem. ALL phones must be able to dial 911, even without service. If the phone can hit a tower, it can call 911.
Doesn’t That tower still need to route the call to 911? And if that routing is broken the call wouldn’t go through…I think?
Towers aren't specific to any single phone company, if you stop paying for your phone service entirely, you can still dial 911. It just hits off the nearest tower.
I was under the impression that a company (AT&T) owns the tower, and they can lease out connections from that tower to other providers. They are also required by law to route 911 calls for free, but I can see a scenario if they botched the routing where 911 would not be accessible from that tower.
They don't always own the tower. Like everything in America, another company fronts the cost, att pays them for tower use. And the other carriers. It's a business model.
That makes sense. I wonder how many AT&T towers were affected. To my knowledge, no one in my area on the east coast was affected if they tried calling 911, just standard numbers.