This worries me

[ace41690]

Ok while i dont have too many complaints about sprints coverage i am now kind of worried about their reliability. We had a nasty thunderstorm and i was out in a neighboring town. I was actually getting my haircut at the time and the power went out. I tried to call someone and i had service, but it was only like the one big T bar. and it kept bouncing around from that to 3 or four bars. When i tried to make a call i got "call failed" several times (network overloading?), and eventually i got it to work after a very long delay in connecting. I was surrounded by other people on their cellphones, i believe two were cingular and the other one was nextel and they were blabbing away just fine. Why was sprint having a problem? Also, when the power goes out in my home town, my cell phone loses its sprint signal. Why dont they have a back up generator in the tower? It just makes me wonder how reliable sprint actually is...

[Fire14]

Depending on where you live, the carriers have been putting batteries or generators for back up, some area's are getting them before others.

[Yankees368]

A lot of sites dont actually have back up power on site. When disaster strikes, these sites will go down with everything else in the area, until that carrier wheels in a generator of some sort. You really never know how it's going to work until it actually happens.

Back in the regional blackout of 2003 (i think that was the year), I was able to get the usual sprint signal, but I could not do anything with it. Who knows.

More recently, I was in Buffalo during that October storm deal, and Sprint never went out, voice or data. No problems at all. Verizon was having lots of issues, but was still active. T-Mobile and Cingy were dead. Nextel was spotty.

[Fire14]

Originally Posted by Yankees368

A lot of sites dont actually have back up power on site. When disaster strikes, these sites will go down with everything else in the area, until that carrier wheels in a generator of some sort. You really never know how it's going to work until it actually happens.

Back in the regional blackout of 2003 (i think that was the year), I was able to get the usual sprint signal, but I could not do anything with it. Who knows.

More recently, I was in Buffalo during that October storm deal, and Sprint never went out, voice or data. No problems at all. Verizon was having lots of issues, but was still active. T-Mobile and Cingy were dead. Nextel was spotty.

I believe after that blackout, the carriers went & put generators &/or battery backups at a lot of locations, I know around here they did & think the govt. pushed it as well.

It's just like those states in the Gulf region, with the hurricanes they have to have some type of backup setup, at least to last for a while.

[WumpusVA]

It's all speculation, but there are thousands of things that can go wrong on a single cell site that take between a minute to several weeks to fix. Perhaps during that particular storm lightning actually struck something vital to the Sprint site but not the others, causing just that one to be out. Anyway, if you ever find yourself in that type of situation try forcing your phone to roam on another network... perhaps that one is still up. Or try sending a text message if you can't make a call...

[larry]

Roaming is your friend for these situations. Don't be afraid to use it.

[R11290]

When the power goes out to my area of town (including the cell tower where Alltel and T-Mobile are co-located), my Alltel signal stays with full service but my T-Mobile signal drops from full service to a spotty 0-1 bar after 30 minutes or so.

[Yankees368]

Originally Posted by R11290

When the power goes out to my area of town (including the cell tower where Alltel and T-Mobile are co-located), my Alltel signal stays with full service but my T-Mobile signal drops from full service to a spotty 0-1 bar after 30 minutes or so.

In this case, Alltel is probably using a full blown gas powered generator. As for T-Mobile, they are probably using some sort of limited battery back up

[Andy]

Originally Posted by Yankees368

In this case, Alltel is probably using a full blown gas powered generator. As for T-Mobile, they are probably using some sort of limited battery back up

Agreed- ALLTEL seems to have great backups in place on their cell sites. Full blown generators are what I see on ALLTEL sites.

ace,
As to why the Sprint signal went out there are a million reasons, but nothing to be concerned about, reliability wise. Why did you not force your phone onto a roaming partner during the Sprint issue?

[ace41690]

Originally Posted by Andy

Agreed- ALLTEL seems to have great backups in place on their cell sites. Full blown generators are what I see on ALLTEL sites.

ace,
As to why the Sprint signal went out there are a million reasons, but nothing to be concerned about, reliability wise. Why did you not force your phone onto a roaming partner during the Sprint issue?

It wasnt an emergency where i really needed to make a call, and i had nothing better to do so i was in a way exerimenting with it and trying to figure out if i could actually make a call go through. Its just that you cant always rely on roaming because, while in most places there is a roaming partner to fall back on, there isnt always one. And it seemed like the sprint site was still "on" because i still had a signal, but it was just really difficult to get a call to go through. i figured that they just didnt have enough capacity on whatever tower i was connected to and that everybody was calling everybody else on their cell phones because of the storm and the power going out.

[larry]

Originally Posted by ace41690

It wasnt an emergency where i really needed to make a call, and i had nothing better to do so i was in a way exerimenting with it and trying to figure out if i could actually make a call go through. Its just that you cant always rely on roaming because, while in most places there is a roaming partner to fall back on, there isnt always one. And it seemed like the sprint site was still "on" because i still had a signal, but it was just really difficult to get a call to go through. i figured that they just didnt have enough capacity on whatever tower i was connected to and that everybody was calling everybody else on their cell phones because of the storm and the power going out.

Sprint does have at least one roaming partner in every market. So yes there is always one unless you happen to be out of range of that carriers signal or something.

[ace41690]

Originally Posted by larry

Sprint does have at least one roaming partner in every market. So yes there is always one unless you happen to be out of range of that carriers signal or something.

Thats what I meant. For example, in my town the only service that used to work was sprint, it was sprint or nothing. Therefore, roaming would have been completely useless. No other carrier had a signal. That's why me and all my friends ended up with sprint in the first place.

[larry]

Originally Posted by ace41690

Thats what I meant. For example, in my town the only service that used to work was sprint, it was sprint or nothing. Therefore, roaming would have been completely useless. No other carrier had a signal. That's why me and all my friends ended up with sprint in the first place.

Dang that sucks. What happened to the two licensed cellular carriers?

[ace41690]

Originally Posted by larry

Dang that sucks. What happened to the two licensed cellular carriers?

It doesnt really suck. Most of us are fairly happy with sprint. There are other carriers in town now. But until the end of last year sprint was the only one that provided service here. There's only three towers, and they were all sprint only for the past few years. Now verizon and cingular are here, still no Tmobile or Nextel. As for why sprint was the only one that was ever here, I really dont know.