Water and power outages more than violent wind affected wireless networks as Hurricane Floyd skirted the East Coast last week.
AT&T Corp. Friday apologized to customers for wireless network outages in parts of metropolitan New York and New Jersey caused by the hurricane.
The company said flooding in a Rochelle Park, N.J., switching facility caused service to be interrupted Thursday night to customers in Brooklyn, Upper Westchester, Rockland and Putnam counties in New York; Litchefield County in Connecticut; and Bergen, Essex, Lower Passaic and parts of Hudson and Union Counties in New Jersey. Wireless service to Newark International Airport also was impacted by the flooding.
Flood water entered the AT&T Wireless Services building and caused damage to three wireless switches, forcing technicians to power down all equipment at the facility. AT&T said it was attempting to restore service Friday while it tried to reroute wireless traffic to other switching centers.
BellSouth Mobility DCS spokesman Shawn Steward said none of the company’s towers were affected by the hurricane, but power outages and problems with T1 lines affected about 15 percent of its sites in evacuated areas of North Carolina, South Carolina and coastal Georgia Thursday. By midday Friday, the company was still working on outages and T1 problems at 2 percent of its sites.
Steward also said its networks experienced call volumes up to 30 percent greater than usual on highways that served as evacuation routes from coastal areas in Georgia and Florida.
Bell Atlantic Mobile spokeswoman Andrea Linskey said the company’s wireless networks were mostly unaffected by the storm. The company experienced one outage as a result of flooding in a central landline office in New Jersey, and several wireless sites relied on back-up power and generators.
Powertel Inc. also reported few glitches in its PCS network.
