Landlines AND Cell Service Out During PG&E Shutoff

It's 2019, the last year in a breakneck decade that saw advances in digital technology that disrupted everything in its path, with little time to close open loops and cauterize frayed systems, leaving many humans in a primitive state. Last December, Californians discovered when the power goes out, so do their backup analog landline communication lines, which was not the case in 2009. This October, we're discovering both a landline phone and a fully charged cell phone are useless during a power outage:

When Stephanie Yamkovenko woke up in the Santa Cruz Mountains on Oct. 10, her power was out — and so was her cell phone service. It was in the midst of PG&E’s unprecedented power outages that cut electricity to millions of customers across Northern California.

When her husband left for the office, she was alone at home ,where she sometimes works and couldn’t reach him. Her neighbor, who has an AT&T landline, couldn’t connect either. Neither could other neighbors with Verizon cell service.

During the Fall 2018 Paradise fires, the SF Weekly reported that homeowners with landlines didn't get alert calls because, unbeknownst to them, phone companies had changed the underlying infrastructure to those analog phones to be run by digital means. Which means, the landlines we used to rely on during earthquakes, power outages, etc. are no longer a backup communication line.


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Further Reading:

Oct 8 2019: Cell phone service should work during PG&E shut-offs, companies say   sfchronicle.com

Sep 16, 2019: FCC pressures cell service providers to prepare for California wildfire power shutoffs   sfchronicle.com

December 2018: "Among the half of households still using landlines these days, few of them realize their home lines won't work when the power is out, regardless of what kind of phone they have, because the underlying analog telephone networks have been replaced with digital networks."   offlinereport.net

December 2018: "A Harvard Business Review in 2014 reported the FCC was coordinating the replacement of analog telephone networks with digital ones."   offlinereport.net

Nov 2018: Church bells explored as next warning technology   sfweekly.com

May 2018: CalFIRE's Reverse 9-1-1 Failure (Operator: "What's a reverse 9-1-1")   offlinereport.net




This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.