From The Texas Newsroom:
The aftermath of Hurricane Beryl has left many Houston-area residents contending with cellular service problems like weak signals, spotty coverage or dropped calls midway through conversations.
Crews are working to get customers back to normal, but the issues could linger for a few more days. So, what’s to blame? High winds? Scorching temperatures? Humidity?
Actually, no. It all comes down to power, and which cell towers are up and running first. That’s according to Kelly Morrison, principal technical support at AT&T.
“You have multiple towers around a big city like Houston and as we restore service, we will prioritize different towers,” he said. “So, a neighborhood that may be served by multiple towers may only be served by one until the other service or other towers are restored.”
Although Beryl passed through Texas with hurricane-strength winds speeds, they didn’t damage AT&T cell towers or offices. So, it’s just an issue of providing temporary power though generators until service providers can restore power.
The more towers that have electricity, the more service will improve, Morrison said, adding that crews began working to set up mobile generators as soon as it was safe.
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“That’s what we started to do to restore power to as many cell sites as possible. And service will improve as more and more sites come on air so that that network mesh gets restored, and the service goes back up to, you know, what people expect,” he said.
Until the systems are running normally, Morrison said the best way to communicate is via texting.
“They’re the smallest little bits of data for our network to manage,” he said. “If network service is not where it normally is – and you need to get the word out to somebody that you’re okay or you need assistance – using a simple text message is going to your best result. It’s very easy for the network to process that, even when it may not be at 100%.”
Robert Heath, a former adjunct professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, said other cellular providers might experience issues if their signals originate from different sources.
“The cellular signals can come from antennas located in other places, like the tops of buildings,” he said. “When a building doesn’t have power, then it becomes more likely that the cellular equipment on the building doesn’t have power either.”
Heath added that a limited number of towers could lead to an overloading of the cellular network until electricity is restored to more structures.
“The network can work even with fewer active towers, but then it becomes more likely that people will overload the connections. There are backup network connections and backup power generators,” he said.
RELATED: Houston-area residents share their Hurricane Beryl photos, experiences
Hurricane Beryl was the first hurricane to hit Texas this year and one of the earliest on record and Morrison agreed with weather experts who said there could be more coming.
He said planning for future weather events will likely look similar to what AT&T did for Beryl.
“The prep that we did ahead of this is the prep that we’ve been doing for years,” he said. “And we are expecting it to be a busier than normal year. AT&T has its own meteorologists. It’s called the weather operations center. And they brief us twice a day, if needed, on what to expect.”
Heath said academic and industrial research communities are also busy studying how to prepare for future weather events.
“There is work on using aerial vehicles (drones as base stations), high altitude platforms, or even low earth orbit satellite communications. It remains an important area of research,” he said.
