Why Didn't Cell Phones Work?

Trouble In Times Of Instant Communication

(CBS)  Cell phones proved to be a lifeline for many people on Sept. 11, but during the current blackout in the northeast, they were unreliable at best. So what was different this time, and why did so many people experience phone problems?

AOL advisor Regina Lewis visits The Early Show to offer some answers to these questions.

Caught in the blackout Thursday, Lewis had to run down 42 flights of steps and spend the night in a hotel lobby. But she was awake for her interview with co-anchor Rene Syler. Lewis says there were two factors contributing to sporadic cell-phone service.

“The first is power," she says. "That's the entire story here. Most people think, ‘Well, my cell phone doesn't need electricity, so what's up with that?’ But the network that transmits the call does. We talked to Sprint late last night. They call it a power-to-the-tower failure. Thousands of those towers went down. They do have backup plans but it makes them less reliable.

"Couple that with an immediate increase, 30 percent, in usage - everybody trying to make calls at once. Not a winning combination,” Lewis says.

To prevent problems with cell-phones, Lewis recommends having an old-fashioned landline. She notes a lot of people with cordless phones found themselves in trouble.

As for the Internet, those with battery-operated laptops were fine, Lewis says. “It had very little disruption except for 400,000 people [users] were missing. That's because their electricity went out.”

She notes for users who found congestion locally could always switch the access number they used. “You trick your computer into thinking you're in Montana," Lewis says. "Same reason why long-distance phone calls go through, but you can't call down the street.”

Another way to communicate is text messages, she adds. “The whole key theme here is redundancy,” Lewis says. “If you have all of these things, you up your odds that one of them is going work.”