What a Nationwide AT&T Outage Meant for Our First Responders

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AT&T service outage impactHow Did Yesterday’s Huge AT&T Service Outage Influence First Responders – and What Can We Study?

DRONELIFE is happy to current this visitor put up by Matt Sloane, the Founder and CEO of Skyfire Consulting. On this piece, Matt talks in regards to the outcomes of his casual survey of first responders: did yesterday’s huge AT&T outage affect their applications?  DRONELIFE neither accepts nor makes fee for visitor posts.  All photos courtesy Skyfire.

By Matt Sloane

Whereas tens of hundreds of American AT&T clients complained about not with the ability to order their Starbucks forward of time, or dropping their every day login streak on Sweet Crush, there was a much more regarding subject yesterday in my thoughts — what does the lack of cell service do to our public security drone operators’ capacity to fly and reply to calls?

911 facilities throughout the nation reported further excessive name quantity, principally resulting from folks calling in to “ensure 911 labored,” however largely, public security companies utilizing AT&T providers have been working on “FirstNet” circuits, moderately than the general public AT&T circuits.

FirstNet is a separate mobile community constructed particularly for public security and emergency response suppliers; in order that in a case the place public cell circuits are overloaded or down, first responders can nonetheless talk.

Yesterday could have been the most important take a look at but for FirstNet, which additionally occurs to be run by AT&T; and in accordance with the anecdotes I acquired from lots of our purchasers and pals, it labored simply high quality!

That’s the excellent news.

The unhealthy information is that any civilian among the many 70,000+ AT&T subscribers affected by yesterday’s outage would have had no strategy to name or textual content 911 in the event that they weren’t close to WiFi.

So what have an effect on did this have on the nation’s public security drone operators? Apparently not a lot.

In my unofficial survey, most companies reported that whereas their civilian AT&T cell telephones have been having issues, their FirstNet units – each telephones and hotspots utilized in drone response – appeared to be working usually.

Much more useful have been the recommendations I acquired again from a couple of of those of us about methods to stop an outage like this from affecting operations.

Many talked of utilizing hotspots with SIM playing cards from a number of operators – 1 AT&T, 1 Verizon, 1 T-Cell, simply in case one of many three went down – and some have additionally invested in Starlink’s satellite tv for pc web service in case a catastrophe right here on earth took out a number of networks.

Total, phrase on the road appears to be that the system labored as designed, and the outages have been merely an inconvenience for many individuals; nevertheless it proved to be a great train for our nation’s public security companies to see in a real-world state of affairs how their coaching and preparation stands up beneath adversarial situations.

Matt Sloane is the CEO and founding father of Skyfire Consulting and its mother or father firm, Atlanta Drone Group. Earlier than he based Atlanta Drone Group in 2014, Matt spent 14 years in numerous roles at CNN in Atlanta, Matt has additionally labored as a licensed Emergency Medical Technician for Emory EMS, working his means as much as Chief of Assets and Planning for the division.
Matt is an inaugural member of the Nationwide Fireplace Safety Affiliation (NFPA) technical committee on drones, a technical advisor to the Worldwide Affiliation of Fireplace Chiefs expertise council, and an FAA-certified pilot.

Learn extra from Matt Sloane:



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