When the phone company's phones go outgreenspun.com : LUSENET : Y2K discussion group : One Thread |
By LOUIS HAU
© St. Petersburg Times
published July 8, 2002Problems with wireless service can affect everyone, even -- as Verizon found out last week -- the phone company.
About 1,500 Verizon service technicians were stuck with dead cell phones last Wednesday when their wireless service went out.
The culprit wasn't Verizon Wireless but Alltel, a legacy of Verizon's formation from the merger of GTE and Bell Atlantic. As part of the merger, Alltel took over GTE Wireless' Florida operations, leaving some Verizon employees with Alltel service contracts that won't expire for another year.
An error in Alltel's billing system accidentally suspended service Wednesday morning to "a few thousand" customers in Florida, Virginia and Arizona, Alltel spokeswoman Karen Hern says. Service was restored by 5 p.m. that day.
Because their vehicles are no longer equipped with two-way radios, technicians who needed to hail a colleague during the outage had to perform the telecom equivalent of typing an office memo on carbon paper: They hooked up their portable test phones to the pale-green "cross-connect" boxes that link nearby residences and businesses to a central switching office. Verizon spokesman Bob Elek said the Alltel outage didn't disrupt Verizon's ability to respond to customer service calls.
St. Petersburg Times
-- Anonymous, July 08, 2002