Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Wireless firms question reliance on grid

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2003 21:38:33 -0400

Wireless firms question reliance on grid

By David Ho
Associated Press Writer

9/15/2003

WASHINGTON

The cellular industry is questioning its reliance on the nation's electric grid
after last month's massive blackout, which outlasted the backup power reserves of
many cell phone transmission sites.

A dozen hours into the blackout, nearly a third of cell sites in areas affected by
the blackout were knocked out, Kathryn Condello, a vice president with the
Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association, said Monday. A full day into
the outage, wireless firms had restored some of the sites but 23 percent still
were shut down.

Cellular providers had prepared for more localized and shorter power outages, but
the blackout that began on Aug. 14 was "just huge and far beyond anything we had
experienced in the past," Condello said. She spoke at a meeting of a Federal
Communications Commission advisory committee formed to study ways to prepare
communications systems for a terrorist attack or natural disaster.

After some cell sites exhausted their batteries, which typically run no longer
than four hours, wireless companies sent teams to restore power or redirected
calls to nearby sites that still worked, Condello said. Nearly all the sites were
restored 40 hours after the blackout began.

Many people got busy signals early in the blackout because a surge of calls
clogged networks, she said. Wireless call volume during the first three hours of
the blackout at times spiked to five times normal.

"Now that the unthinkable has happened, the wireless sector is actively reviewing
its assumptions about the electrical sector," Condello said. She would not
speculate on what the industry would do, since the precise cause of the blackout
hasn't been determined.

"In times of crisis like this we're going to see an ever-growing
increase-in-demand spikes on the wireless network," FCC Chairman Michael Powell
said. He said the cellular industry should be preparing for this kind of emergency
demand because, increasingly, when something goes wrong a person's "first impulse
is to start reaching for that cell phone."

http://abcnews.go.com/wire/Politics/ap20030915_1876.html

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