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Cellular outage in U.S. hits AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon users

cnbc.com

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Re: Cellular outage in U.S. hits AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon users

#481

Post by talldatethrow »

stevewodil wrote: post #445
talldatethrow wrote: post #314

Did anyone have a phone fail during this outage? My Pixel 4XL was working at 2am as I placed it on the charger (even though it had about 80%). Noticed zero bars. Shrugged and went to sleep. Woke up at 9am and the phone is totally non operational. Yes I know sometimes phones just break, but less rarely while not moving, not wet, not dropped, or due to a charging issue. What a coincidence.

Android has historically done poorly in areas with no signal with regards to battery life. Did it come back after charging it?

No it won't register any signs of life. I replaced it with a Moto G Stylus 2023 model on sale at Walmart for $60 because I needed a phone asap. Att pay as you go phone but I was able to just put my original att sim into it.

It's basically almost as good as the pixel 4xl although picture quality isn't as good.

Re: Cellular outage in U.S. hits AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon users

#482

Post by sobriquet9 »

rany_ wrote: post #457
sobriquet9 wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From cold start. Most starts are not cold. The phone knows where it is, approximately, what time it is (within a second or so, from built-in RTC), and orbital parameters of the satellites overhead (maybe without the latest corrections). My Garmin watch gets a GPS lock in way less than 5 minutes without any cellular connection.

Actually, your Garmin probably gets A-GPS data uploaded to it via the app. I think that because Huami/Amazfit/Xiaomi smartwatches already do that. We know this from reverse engineering efforts in Gadgetbridge, but support for Garmin is still new and so there isn't as much info about it; either way it probably works in the same way.

No, it's not paired to the phone, and there is no Garmin app on the phone either.

Re: Cellular outage in U.S. hits AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon users

#483

Post by ksec »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #418
Animats wrote: post #331

This is a serious architectural flaw. In the entire history of electromechanical switching in the Bell System, no central office was ever out of service for more than 30 minutes for any reason other than a natural disaster, or, on one single occasion, a major fire in NYC. The AT&T Long Lines system in the 1960s and 1970s had ten regional centers, all independent and heavily interconnected. There was a control center,…

I've been thinking about how pretty much no USA infrastructure of today is as reliable as of the last half of the 20th century. Just my imagination, or true? And what does it mean?

It depends on you view this. If you measure by total bit / data / time per customer served divided by the total outage time I would think we are still very reliable in terms of telecoms. It is worth remember we are likely serving 1 to 100 million times of what we did on mobile network 30 years ago.

Just purely in terms of total downtime itself we are less realible. Purely because of the complexity involves.

Re: Cellular outage in U.S. hits AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon users

#484

Post by ksec »

Animats wrote: post #331

This is a serious architectural flaw. In the entire history of electromechanical switching in the Bell System, no central office was ever out of service for more than 30 minutes for any reason other than a natural disaster, or, on one single occasion, a major fire in NYC. The AT&T Long Lines system in the 1960s and 1970s had ten regional centers, all independent and heavily interconnected. There was a control center,…

Hopefully this get wider coverage and report. One of the top discussion point of 6G was to simplify it both for technical reason and cost reduction reason. 5G brought us enough capacity headroom that most MNOs today still dont find enough incentive to deploy.

May be it doesn't even need to be 6G. With 5.5G and above and OpenRAN there is another opportunity to radically reduce complexity I could only hope there is enough of push towards this.

Re: Cellular outage in U.S. hits AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon users

#485

Post by ksec »

jader201 wrote: post #276

Something I'm not seeing discussion on: What is/were the cascading effects of this, particularly for drivers? Many people in buildings were unaffected, as they could fallback to wifi. But I imagine this had a pretty broad impact to drivers. Just a few things I can think of: - Packages delayed (UPS, FedEx, Amazon, truck drivers, etc.) for drivers that relied on their phone's mapping apps to get them to their deliverie…

I used to think having a World Wide, or City Wide WiFi Network as backup was a stupid idea. May be not so anymore.

Re: Cellular outage in U.S. hits AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon users

#486

Post by lor_louis »

dymk wrote: post #432
lor_louis wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Redundancy was needed because individual nodes/machines were more prone to failure. As machines got more and more reliable, having highly redundant infrastructure was seen as an extra cost.

Do you work at a telecom or are you just guessing?

Used to work with telecom equipment in situations where high availability was required and equipment failure was expected.
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