First I want to say that I hope all of you who were in the area made it through Hurricane Sandy safely. We were hit pretty bad in Manhattan but luckily not so much in my neighborhood. With quite a bit of the population without power there has luckily been middling cellphone coverage. The city has its recovery fully underway but FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said in a press conference (via CNET) that:
"This was and still is a devastating storm with a serious impact on our nation’s communications infrastructure," FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said during a conference call with press this afternoon. "The storm is not over. And our assumption is that communications outages could get worse before they get better, particularly for mobile networks because of the flooding and loss of power."
CNET does a decent job of answering why this is the case especially when backup generators start running out of power and fuel in neighborhoods that are still dark. Hopefully we will hear updates from carriers soon as they try to bring the networks online. In other words we are not out of the woods yet. Expect service to improve slowly and let us know what you are experiencing.
PS: They were not screwing around with alerts for Hurricane Sandy. I received 5-6 of these messages that you see above throughout the storm.
