Hurricane Sandy seems to have brought along with itself a hurricane of problems, especially for communication service providers. As tragic as the situation is in the East Coast, the effects of this hurricane are much more than just broken branches and flooding. Infrastructure has been affected adversely throughout the area; people are stranded at their homes without wireless, internet or home phone services, even some of the 911 stations are out of order or have been diverted to other locations or back up call centers.
AT&T confirmed damage to its network setups in various areas such as downtown Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn etc. whereas uptown the service seemed to be unaffected by the storm, the company is making all possible efforts to deploy material and personnel to sort out the damage and is waiting for the areas to be declared as safe, so that they may proceed.
Sprint Mobile has been able to identify some of the damaged areas; including the New York Tri-State area, Washington D.C. metro area, Pennsylvania, as well as some parts of New England. In a statement made recently they have identified the causes of damage as the power loss, flooding and debris. They are also waiting for areas to be deemed as safe so they may send technicians to repair damages.
Verizon has also witnessed quite a setback due to this hurricane as several of their offices have been flooded and their main switching centers are currently out of order with back up being shut off due to the continued power loss, Verizon has identified FiOS voice, video, and wireless as well as DSL losses. They are on their toes to solve these issues as soon as possible. Though all possible efforts are being made, it may take days, or even weeks to be resolved, analysts say.
Among other affected services are the cable as well as transportation sector. Public transport may remain inaccessible for several days ahead as subway stations are flooded and will take time to be cleared off. Time Warner Cable, and Comcast were also amongst the cable service providers who have witnessed outages in cable transmission; in fact, cable transmission seems to be the most highly affected among all the industries. Comcast sent out letters yesterday to all its subscribers in order to let them know of the conditions under which service might be affected so that they could remain well prepared.
