Hurricane Ida Spurs Calls to Bolster Mobile Networks After Phones Fail

As Hurricane Ida pummeled New Orleans, officials told residents needing help to flag down a police officer or go to a fire station. The city’s 911 emergency calling service, served by AT&T, wasn’t working. The failure, rectified on August 30, is helping to fuel calls for Washington regulators to demand greater resiliency for mobile phone networks in the face of storms, fires and other natural disasters. Outages from past storms and wildfires have raised questions about mobile networks' resiliency. There is no requirement for cell sites to have backup power and the industry has resisted efforts to make that mandatory, arguing that would be burdensome, in part because it can be expensive to rent space for equipment and hard to get permits to store fuel in some places. In decades past, telephones at the end of copper lines could offer service, even during widespread electricity failures, if a nearby hub managed to have power, perhaps from a generator. Now mobile phones are ubiquitous, and often serve as home phones, leaving households vulnerable to outages.