Dear Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Catalina WiFi:
The natives are restless.
Are you aware that our community is very dependent on summer visitors especially over key holidays such as the 4th of July?
Are you aware that Internet and some voice services on our Island had rolling outages for long periods over the holiday week?
Are you aware that your Help Desks are not open 24/7?
Dear Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Catalina WiFi:
The natives are restless.
Are you aware that our community is very dependent on summer visitors especially over key holidays such as the 4th of July?
Are you aware that Internet and some voice services on our Island had rolling outages for long periods over the holiday week?
Are you aware that your Help Desks are not open 24/7?
And finally, are you aware that if our visitors cannot work remotely utilizing the Internet to get work related emails in and out that they … wait for it … GO HOME? And THAT means they stop spending money on restaurants, shops, lodging and activities.
Such was and still is the case, as I write here on Sunday, July 7. I started making calls back on July 2nd to Verizon and after the Help Desk agent had me go through the usual power down, reboot, soft reboot, hard reboot, resetting the SIM card, taking the battery in and out, holding the little hidden button under the battery pack with a paper clip, removing the power cord, saying a prayer to St. Christopher, and then throwing it against the wall, they FINALLY opened a trouble ticket and very politely let me know someone would get back to me in 3-5 business days. Uh, so that means coming up on a week since they opened the ticket, I am only 2 “business days” into the 3-5. Grrrrrrrrrr …
Oh, and by the way, why do they always ask if I was happy with the Help Desk service and be willing to take a customer service survey when THEY DIDN’T FIX THE PROBLEM?!
Being a resourceful local and all, I suggested to a frustrated visitor that she get a day pass from Catalina WiFi for $10.
Oops, bad call since it didn’t help at all and my friend is now out 10 bucks because of me and Catalina WiFi.
Since my career has been in this IT space, I know what happened; and now that the carriers hopefully heard from many of you and our visitors, it won’t happen again. (Okay, I really am not that optimistic and I am guessing neither are you).
Let me explain what happened. When carrier network engineers design the networks to support both voice calls and Internet (data) calls, they do not design for a worst case scenario.
It would cost too much and they would pass that cost onto all of us.
So to keep things low cost, they design for an “average” level of voice and data calls. It’s important to point out that voice and data calls typically travel over different networks; but not always (too difficult to explain all the different network designs but just know voice and Internet stuff don’t usually mix).
That’s why some voice calls and even some emails and tweets went through, usually on an iPhone, but not from a WiFi hotspot of MiFi data card.
Those “calls” to the Internet went over a dedicated data network and I think what happened across all carriers is the engineers way underestimated our “average” usage for special periods such as a long holiday.
Just imagine what it does to a network if all of a sudden thousands of visitors are all Skyping, emailing, streaming YouTube videos and watching streaming movies all at once?
I am pointing this out, not simply because it caused frustration, but it has a major economic impact on the Island.
People ended up leaving the Island earlier than planned because they couldn’t easily work here while the family was out playing.
That should never happen and certainly not to this degree. So, the Chamber, Island Company, other businesses and locals alike, please get the word out to your carriers that this is not good for business and they need to beef up their networks to better accommodate our visitors so they continue to return. We need better Internet capabilities year round including the high bandwidth applications such as streaming video.
It will take time to upgrade the towers so we will all need to be patient.
I suggest in the meantime we get hold of the guy running the Raptor Program and see if he can recruit a few hundred carrier pigeons, as we did back in the day (Yes, Catalina Island really did have a carrier pigeon service) to handle sending messages back and forth to the Island when AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, Verizon and our own Catalina WiFi’s coconut telegraph fail again.
I know we are trying to get rid of pigeons but what’s a few more sacrificial french fries tossed here and there as an Internet backup recovery plan?
After all, they already know how to “tweet,” right?
