> >Michael Pollak had written favorably about cell phone performance in
> >NYC during the recent blackout.
>
> He did? But he doesn't have a cell phone, does he? My cell phone - AT&T
> Wireless - was worthless, and most people I saw on the street had
> similar experiences. I saw a few Verizon customers happily chatting
> away, but that's about it.
Actually what I said was that most of the cell phone services that didn't work weren't actually down but rather were overloaded from too many simultaneous calls (as often often happens in an emergency). However they gave error messages that didn't make that clear. So people you couldn't reach at 5 pm you could reach at 10 pm -- even though the power still wasn't on.
I called people who had Sprint, Verizon and something else and got them all in the evening. Also my Net2phone card started working again so I could use it from the payphones.
Michael