A big reason that the deathstar wanted to abandon the copper wires in the ground is the regulations associated with them, and the very onerous regulations they need to obey, and the SLA for repairs and outages associated with them. Very expensive to have a tech within a half hour of any customer, to attend to a breakdown, and also to have on hand, and available for immediate dispatch in any area, a set of spares that will get there within the 1 hour SLA they have to adhere to to identify the fault. VOIP and Internet, along with cellular communications, are a "best effort" carrier, no real SLA or regulations they have to follow, and a lot more relaxed as to timelines and any actual fix either. so why keep the expensive staff for the copper, when you can fire the lot, hire 1% as fibre and mobile techs, and run them all over to fix faults, so you as exec can get each "expensive" (as in his annual salary is a day of executive renumeration) tech working every minute of the day on faults, and then complain and berate them that it takes more than a minute to go from downtown Manhattan to East Hampton during rush hour.

A old buddy of mine used to work at a major telco's satellite uplink station for trans-ocean traffic back in the early 90's...well before we had (easy and relatively cheap) high bandwidth intercontinental cables. He would often talk about the triple and quadruple (in some of the signal paths) backup systems in place and the 10's of thousands of dollars of liability it would cost them *per second* in the event of a link failure. I can't imagine these days what it cost AT&T for a nationwide hours long outage.

Very interesting, thank you. This gives me insight into a situation an elderly relative is seeing where AT&T keeps trying to move him to a cellphone plan and off his landline, now I understand why. I abandoned AT&T cellphone service (originally Cingular) several years ago when I could no longer get reliable coverage in a rural area where I spend a significant amount of time. It's my understanding that AT&T has stopped serving that area, surrendering its towers. I now use MetroPCS/TMobile because their service is rock solid out there. I don't use my phone much, so no idea whether I was affected by the AT&T outage.

Note that remote monitoring and control of oil wells / power grid systems use the cell network . Also note that at home medical monitoring systems use the cell network for occasional data transfer, there are land line / internet systems that can be used as well. Something else to think about, the cost of a phone call even in the 1980's was pretty high due to the nuke proof land line system. Today phone calls are so inexpensive, that a call cross country is the same cost as a call down the street .

I had a conversation with a Gray TV higher up about them making our local station do away with microwave trucks. Luckily the station was able to get an IP dish on a vehicle. But a few years ago what I was afraid of ended up happening… a tornado wouldn’t allow TVu packs to connect in an area of town hit by a tornado. Fast forward to today…. During this ATT problem the TVu and LIVEu systems did have some issues. Thank goodness the Verizon modems in the packs were able to handle everything!!

I have a different perspective on this. I'm a retired broadcast engineer living in Florida. Comcast and CenturyLink are the telcos. Comcast is completely unreliable even on a clear-weather day. Even for a "business" connection, my downtime with them last year was measured cumulatively in *months*. Comcast went out long before Hurricane Ian even arrived. CenturyLink's facilities were wiped out with the storm surge, and here we are 500+ days later, still no dial tone at my residence. What worked? Cellular. Surprisingly. Even though my two nearest cell sites were completely wiped out by the storm, but I still had passable service. Call audio may have been a bit garbled but it was serviceable, which is all you need at that point in time. I'll give the local broadcasters some crap over their performance during the storm. The majority of the stations went off-air, including TV stations. Many were built in flood zones (duh!) and they knew it. Radio stations all went to simulcasting TV... Which sucks because TV people don't understand radio. With power out, Comcast and CenturyLink dead in the water, and many cell towers dead, NO ONE is watching the coverage. This isn't 1998...we don't have handheld LCD TVs and ATSC reception sucks on a good day. "Look at this damage here." That's nice. What are you showing? Where is it? I'm sure the Chyron guy has it on the screen, but we can't hear it over the radio. Likewise, none of the local stations had good remote setups and feeds. A few Ubiquiti radios and security cameras go a long way. Radio in the USA is dead... Sadly... But it's not the technology, rather it's the content to blame. Mainly lack of content. After going through the hurricane, and having used everything from packet radio to Starlink to Ubiquiti WWAN, to even an aerostat(!) for communications after the hurricane, and seeing that CenturyLink is still dead after 500 days.... I strongly believe wireless is actually the more reliable technology. So much so that for my elderly parents, I've set up their home with two separate cell carriers for phone and internet. I'm kicking around Meshtastic right now, hoping to have something in place before Hurricane season starts again.

AT&T is one of the worst telecommunications companies in existence... They wreck anything they touch. Look at Direct TV, etc. Then they have horrible subsidiaries like Boost Mobile. Why anyone uses this corrupt, incompetent company for anything is beyond me; unless they're cronies getting kickbacks.

VHF radio has never let me down/ Trunking and 800 mhz has

We had this EXACT same thing happen with Rogers in Canada back in 2022. They did a software update that failed. Interac (debit card company) was down and it wreaked havoc. People were PISSED and I don’t blame them. One of our biggest problems in Canada is that we have 3 main carriers, and their sub brands- Bell/Virgin, Telus/Koodo, and Roger’s/Fido. I pay wayyyy too much for my plan with Telus. iPhone 14, unlimited talk/text, 10GB 5G speed, rest is slow but unlimited data and I pay $135 after tax per month. That’s “reasonable” for a “modern” phone plan in Canada.

I’m a amateur radio operator I like all things radio I watch all the broadcast engineers videos and amateur radio videos I want to learn everything that i can about radio

Okay, radio will still be around, however, Some on air talents i know advised me if a big enough event happened, they are not sticking around the station

Looks like we're going to need to back up our cell phones with good ol' 1970's tech, namely, the CB radio, and have it ready on Channel 9 for emergencies. Sadly, they don't have much range, so maybe ham radio would be better(?)

SpaceX is adding cell traffic to Starlink, so all phones in the next few years will have a fallback to Starlink for emergencies. The internet is multi-path redundant, basically for the internet to go down we would be looking at a major cataclysmic event. Hopefully, you have a ham radio, a hunting knife, and solar panels. It's gonna be a bumpy ride.

People text instead of phone call now because the lag and unintentionally talking over each other parts. A good ole' duplexer landline was real time. I Though new tech was supposed to be more convenient and expedient. Seems we are back tracking

No mention of the software update being related to ease of access for three letter agencies......

Radio may not be going anywhere, But I wouldn't trust radio for information. How many people are even at the station anymore? maybe a office girl and a sales person but how many on air people? seems if they have any local on air people it is lights out at 4pm and you get a voice track show from some guy in LA (or NYC). (which can be amusing when the wrong recording goes out like its -20 outside and the "on air" guy is telling you its sunny and a warm 72 out. and yes I have heard this). We have had cases where local areas had an emergency on going and it was crickets from local radio. TV is better but a lot of times if it isn't the "big city" they are based out of you might get a blip about it and that is it... if you are lucky enough to even get noticed. The other part is so many have given up on what actually worked (copper twisted pair, radio rf links) for this internet crap which yeah it works and is nice and all but when it fails it is game over. Kind of like how gas stations have to close down when the computer register goes down and the person behind the counter can't do basic math or have any common sense to use a calculator. (which makes me laugh cause I actually ran a gas station for 8 hours with no electricity, sure no fuel sales and no card payments but I made that station about $600 in cash that day)

Proof that just because something is innovative doesn't mean it should completely replace prior technologies. This SHOULD be a wake up call to all of you, but it won't be.

Hard to believe major corporations about major outages in a year like this

I switched my phone to LTE and had service on that while the 5G was out.

Did you say VOIP is basically like WiFi? Really! My VIOP kept running during the AT&T Outage. My VOIP setup uses an Ethernet ATA to operate all my legacy wired telephones. So my network is fed by fiber and has battery backup throughout. It is only as reliable as the VOIP provider and my fiber provider but there is no WiFi involved. Also don't all cellular cites use a fiber backbone?

We had similar in Australia in November 2023 with Australia's second biggest carrier, Optus. The outage impacted their core network so even landlines were impacted as well as calls to E000 (911). See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Optus_outage