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Comment by softwaredoug | Hacker News Reader

I'm just curious how we as a society manage the uptime of such a critical service? Do we have laws or enforcement in place to regulate / enforce how well basic cellular service (at least the emergency tier) must work in the US?

Just imagining the dropped emergency calls today, etc?

(Genuine question)

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I don’t have anything positive to add, except noting that FirstNet is also down. I’m sure there’s a lot of chaos for emergency responders right now :/

If FirstNet is down that would mean a lot more is down than should be. FirstNet can operate on lower range radio, no?

It can (FirstNet's lower 700mhz spectrum), but AT&T uses the same backbone and infrastructure and towers for large chunks of their and FirstNet's network.

(charitably) - FirstNet is mostly now just a type of billing plan and priority level, on AT&T's network.

> FirstNet is also down

CNN reported that AT&T confirmed it has not been impacted throughout this event.

https://www.cnn.com/business/live-news/att-outage-02-22-24/i...

FirstNet absolutely went down in my locality (western Ohio, near Dayton). I was on shift for after hours support of a public safety answering point (AKA a 911 center) and I received a call at 04:14 Eastern stating that all the law enforcement/fire mobile units on FirstNet disconnected from the VPN and that no FirstNet cell phones could make/receive calls or send/receive text messages.

911 support is required of companies, it's monitored and fixed when not working.

But in this case, it's redundancy from the various providers - all providers must let you make a 911 call, no matter your phone or contract or provider.

So if AT&T's towers go down, your phone can still make 911 calls via Verizon or whomever else has a tower in your area, anything that can hear your phone will respond to a 911 call request.

Even a landline could have emergency calls disrupted if a line was cut somewhere. unless every device was behaves as a router with more than one signal in/out, there will always be a potential for loss of signal and interruption of service.

You should be able to connect to a different network (e.g. Verizon) and make a 911 call even without a plan. You won't be authenticated to the network for data, but 911 is supposed to still work.

911 is regulated. I’m unsure on anything else (I simply don’t know).

People/companies that actually care already have a second line and are taking very good note of this.

usually redundancy. but as these companies squeeze more and more out of gear, we risk large cascade failures that are hard to recover from. could also have been some kind of firmware upgrade. anecdotally, the 4G LTE phones seem to not be affected whereas the newer 5G ones seem to be. maybe it was a botched deployment. i'm sure ATT will give us a really well rounded RCA ;)

Don't be surprised if it's a botched Helm deployment ;)

> i'm sure ATT will give us a really well rounded RCA ;)

Knowing most megacorps, they'll blame some midlevel engineer doing a "bad" thing, when it was ordered from above.

> Just imagining the dropped emergency calls today

Carriers do get fined for E911 downtime IIRC. It is taken very seriously, as a result.

Landlines still work, and it's not too expensive to keep it as a redundancy.

how does a landline become relevant when one is not at home? right up to the start of work from home, I was spending very little time at home. a landline made no sense at that point.

They are getting more expensive and less reliable:

https://www.ooma.com/blog/home-phone/landline-home-phone-is-...

Last time I had a real landline, it was flakier than cell service. The companies don't really maintain them

> laws or enforcement

No no no, see, we have those. But we only use them to make sure that our for-profit prison complex stays massively profitable and the people in power retain that power.

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