• UppitPuppet@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Did you actually dial 911? Because if you tried dialing 911 and it didn’t go through, that’s a problem. ALL phones must be able to dial 911, even without service. If the phone can hit a tower, it can call 911.

    • MacAttak8@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Correct. I had to connect to WiFi to use ATT calls over WiFi to call the non emergency number to be transferred to my needed emergency services. My local news station put out an announcement about ATT customers not being able to contact local 911 operators. May have had something to do with my county specifically. Still, a major issues.

      • UppitPuppet@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        If that’s true, that’s wack. There’s no reason that the one phone company’s service issue should have affected your phone’s ability to call 911. Towers aren’t company specific so it doesn’t make sense that there would be interference 🤔 someone fucked up

        • RedFox@infosec.pub
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          8 months ago

          It’s not always about towers and signal.

          There’s call routes and service monitoring involved.

          Call routing still has to happen to get you to 911. Service monitoring still happens to try directing your 911 call to another 911 dispatch center. If those two functions are broke, you get nothing no matter what.

    • ji17br@lemmy.ml
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      8 months ago

      Doesn’t That tower still need to route the call to 911? And if that routing is broken the call wouldn’t go through…I think?

      • UppitPuppet@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Towers aren’t specific to any single phone company, if you stop paying for your phone service entirely, you can still dial 911. It just hits off the nearest tower.

        • ji17br@lemmy.ml
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          8 months ago

          I was under the impression that a company (AT&T) owns the tower, and they can lease out connections from that tower to other providers. They are also required by law to route 911 calls for free, but I can see a scenario if they botched the routing where 911 would not be accessible from that tower.

          • RedFox@infosec.pub
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            8 months ago

            They don’t always own the tower. Like everything in America, another company fronts the cost, att pays them for tower use. And the other carriers. It’s a business model.

          • UppitPuppet@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            That makes sense. I wonder how many AT&T towers were affected. To my knowledge, no one in my area on the east coast was affected if they tried calling 911, just standard numbers.