Saturday, September 7, 2013

AT&T And T-Mobile Team For Sandy Victims To Communicate

By Cornelius Nunev


According to the FCC, about 25 percent of all cell towers are down in the 10 states affected by Hurricane Sandy. However, in a rare act of cooperation between the communications competition, AT&T and T-Mobile have publicized that they will be temporarily joining their networks to supplied service for Sandy victims in two of the areas hit hardest by the storm, New York City and New Jersey.

Getting together to assist

A number of people are calling Sandy a "super storm." It has caused land lines to go down entirely and has made it really hard to get calls through on the networks. The cell connection has been pretty bad.

In New York City, 20 percent of the networks were down, according to T-Mobile.

In order to help the sufferers of Sandy, AT&T and T-Mobile are combining efforts and sharing 3G networks and GSM networks. They will not charge any roaming fees or change service agreements to do this.

The businesses are compatible for sharing with one another since they are both using GSM and UMTS standards.

Least-congested will look after call

In a press release, both AT&T and T-Mobile said that their consumers will have to do nothing out of the ordinary when making a call. When they make a call in any of the impacted areas, no matter which of the two carriers they use, the least congested network at that time will deal with the call.

Waiting for it to get better

Although the deal is a temporary one, there is no telling how long it may continue. The ongoing inclement weather makes the job of getting those communications towers back up all the more slow and difficult.

Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, told reporters on Oct. 30:

"Our assumption is that communications outages could get worse before they get better, particularly for mobile."

Backup generators may not last long enough while operating cell towers until power is restored. Nobody knows when the power will come back on.

Opportunity for ad

But of course no marketing opportunity is left untried, even in times of disaster, as the press release that inspired this post indicates. AT&T and T-Mobile are both doing a good thing for the troubled areas, but neither overlooks an opportunity for brand recognition.




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