Staying in touch

Hurricane season starts today, raising the curtain on a cast of characters and a host of contraptions that wireless phone providers promise will keep their customers chatting if a storm rolls through.

Verizon, for instance, deployed the "Test Men" made famous in commercials by asking, "Can you hear me now?" It turns out that the phone company really does employ an entire army of those people who drive around in $250,000 vehicles equipped with phones and computers trying to answer their own question.

They traveled more than 22,000 miles across South Carolina this year, measuring the quality of their service compared with the competition, according to Verizon officials.

AT&T stands ready to set up a base camp after a natural disaster, complete with tents, bathrooms, a kitchen, a nurse, laundry facilities and even 10,000 ready-to-eat meals for employees restoring service to customers.

And Sprint can, within hours of a request, put a priority on emergency workers' calls to make sure they can communicate with one another and residents who need them even when service stops for everyone else.

Each of the three major wireless phone providers boasts of spending millions in new and expanded technology over the past year in preparation for today.

Traffic jam

Just as bridges aren't meant to carry an entire community all at once, wireless networks aren't mean to handle an entire community's calls simultaneously, said Sprint spokesman John Taylor.

When an earthquake rattled southern Los Angeles last May, "everyone in the country wanted to call L.A., and all of L.A. wanted to call the rest of the country at the same time," Taylor said.

"You can't get everyone on the information superhighway at the same time," he added.

Sprint spent $16 million in South Carolina on network preparations and adding 20 new sites to its network, according to Taylor.

Verizon, which is absorbing the business of rival carrier Alltel, invested $30 million in the state last year, said company spokeswoman Karen Schulz. The money was spent on 35 new or enhanced towers and buildings designed to withstand a Category 5 storm.

AT&T spent more than $500 million nationally to build its response capabilities, but the company does not break down the numbers by market, according to spokeswoman Amy Bristle.

In addition to sheer call volume, phones also can fail during and after storms if "switching" facilities needed to connect the handheld devices succumb to the elements. That's what happened in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, Taylor said, as floodwaters took down the land-based buildings that provide those electronic linkages.

To keep people talking without that go-between infrastructure, phone providers trot out their COWs and COLTs.

In the telecommunications world, the acronyms stand for "Cells on Wheels" and "Cells on Light Trucks." The vehicles are essentially mobile networks that, through satellite technology, connect callers without needing a third-party land-line company.

During disaster preparations this year, cell providers also pumped up what industry insiders call "redundancy," or developing alternative power sources to keep the networks online. In layman's terms, that means having generators and batteries at the ready.

Making connections

This year's hurricane season carries special weight because it marks the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Hugo's hit. Back then, wireless phones were the size of bricks and reserved for the elite.

Today, they're so commonplace and integral to business and personal communications that providers take on an almost militaristic approach to keep their customers in touch when the weather turns nasty. The companies said they work with emergency operations centers in a similar fashion to electric utilities or even the fire department, sending representatives to provide updates and answer questions on location.

Verizon fires up its Wireless Emergency Communications Centers in the wake of a disaster, rolling into town with chargers, batteries and phones for emergency workers and residents who otherwise cannot call out. Schulz, the Verizon spokeswoman, said those services aren't necessarily limited to customers.

"In times of emergency, we just want to be there to make sure the community has what the community needs," she said.

AT&T's Global Network Operations Center in Bedminster, N.J., conducts disaster simulations year-round from the same site where the company monitors its service across the world. AT&T also maintains Mobile Command Centers (tractor-trailers outfitted with workstations and satellite dishes) and emergency communications vehicles (sports utility vehicles equipped with military-grade satellite communications).

Sprint's Emergency Response Team dispatches to a disaster scene to get working phones to rescue workers as quickly as possible. The company also boasts the press-to-talk Nextel technology that kept then-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani in touch with rescue workers on Sept. 11.

Sprint spokesman Taylor said the Direct Connect technology avoids the land-line network and became a lifeline for emergency workers in Hurricane Katrina's aftermath as well.

"When a storm hits," he said, "people just want to be able to say, 'I'm OK.' "

Reach Allyson Bird at 937-5594 or abird@postandcourier.com.