How Did Yesterday’s Huge AT&T Service Outage Affect First Responders – and What Can We Be taught?
DRONELIFE is happy to current this visitor submit 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 packages? DRONELIFE neither accepts nor makes fee for visitor posts. All pictures courtesy Skyfire.
By Matt Sloane
Whereas tens of hundreds of American AT&T clients complained about not having 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 concern yesterday in my thoughts — what does the lack of cell service do to our public security drone operators’ capability to fly and reply to calls?
911 facilities throughout the nation reported additional excessive name quantity, largely because of folks calling in to “make certain 911 labored,” however largely, public security businesses utilizing AT&T companies had been working on “FirstNet” circuits, quite 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 might have been the largest check but for FirstNet, which additionally occurs to be run by AT&T; and in response to the anecdotes I acquired from lots of our shoppers and associates, it labored simply effective!
That’s the excellent news.
The dangerous information is that any civilian among the many 70,000+ AT&T subscribers affected by yesterday’s outage would have had no method 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 businesses reported that whereas their civilian AT&T cell telephones had been having issues, their FirstNet gadgets – each telephones and hotspots utilized in drone response – appeared to be working usually.
Much more useful had been the ideas I obtained again from a couple of of those of us about learn how 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-Cellular, 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 had been merely an inconvenience for many individuals; nevertheless it proved to be a superb train for our nation’s public security businesses to see in a real-world state of affairs how their coaching and preparation stands up below 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 an authorized Emergency Medical Technician for Emory EMS, working his manner as much as Chief of Sources and Planning for the division.
Matt is an inaugural member of the Nationwide Hearth Safety Affiliation (NFPA) technical committee on drones, a technical advisor to the Worldwide Affiliation of Hearth Chiefs know-how council, and an FAA-certified pilot.
Learn extra from Matt Sloane:
Miriam McNabb is the Editor-in-Chief of DRONELIFE and CEO of JobForDrones, knowledgeable drone companies market, and a fascinated observer of the rising drone trade and the regulatory atmosphere for drones. Miriam has penned over 3,000 articles targeted on the industrial drone house and is a global speaker and acknowledged determine within the trade. Miriam has a level from the College of Chicago and over 20 years of expertise in excessive tech gross sales and advertising for brand spanking new applied sciences.
For drone trade consulting or writing, E mail Miriam.
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