By ISAIAH FRIZZELL
What phone service do you use? Verizon? AT&T? GoogleFi? Sprint? Have you experienced an unprecedented number of outages or unusual outings? If not, great! If so, you should know that people all over Blaine County are encountering debilitating phone service issues and it’s somewhat unclear why.
If you are a member of Blaine County Rants and Raves, or social media in general, you may have seen posts of a similar ilk describing communication issues. Again, this is more than just a swiping right on Tinder or ghosting issue — this is business and family. As community members, we strive to keep each other informed and aware — what we’re seeing is everything from dropped calls to suddenly unsendable text messages, images, inability to text, inability to make calls to same service phones or those under other plans often where WiFi is the only method for phone use. There’s a litany of issues that are interfering directly with people’s ability to conduct business, check on loved ones or just go about their daily lives.
When calling the Hailey AT&T store, a friendly employee explained that a tower somewhere south, near Bellevue, had been damaged by the storm. No further details were given, as this information is proprietary and AT&T aisreluctant to disclose it, even to store employees. It was explained that the problem was supposed to be fixed by the 17th, but if you’re still experiencing downtime, you can go to AT&T to enter your address and see if your neighborhood is one affected. https://www.att.com/outages/.
This can be done from a web portal, assuming you have internet access or your phone itself via downloadable app or phone browser. If your service is down, perhaps a friend or family member can step in. Another site to look for outages is https://downdetector.com/.
We know AI services are increasing on all technology platforms. In fact, Google recently laid off and they rely on massive amounts of data to train. Could it be malfunctioning updates? Perhaps you heard that T-Mobile was fining customers for sending messages it didn’t agree with. Well, that was “fact-checked” to be false (wait, who fact checks the fact checkers?) (usatoday.com)
Verizon experienced a massive outage in November across the entire North American continent. Many weren’t affected but millions were. (datacenterdynamics.com)
So was it just the storm damaging a tower? Likely – and that’s the explanation given, so we’ll go with that, but in the event of a lengthy outage, a community needs communication, thus it could be wise to have some form of backup communication that didn’t rely entirely on monolithic services. There are many of these and they range from HAM radios that reach into the tens of thousands of dollars to LoraWan bluetooth phone transceivers that go for less than $100.
If you work from home, do telemarketing, or internet-based work. perhaps it would be a good idea to have a central social media page as well as a physical meetup or message board to keep everyone in the loop. If you can’t conduct business, whether it’s because of a phone or a phthalate, you can always go for a walk!