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Once the power went down in the southwestern United States, it was only a matter of time before cell phone access went down, too, said Fred Harris, professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

鈥淭he networks are only designed to carry a certain amount of traffic and companies design for what they expect the traffic level to be,鈥� Harris said. 鈥淚nitially, it was flooded by so many people getting on, the system came to capacity 鈥� that meant it was using every resource it had to service each caller and there were no other resources left for other users.

鈥淟ater on in the day, the cell phone company towers themselves were running on battery backup power because they lost their primary power source.鈥�

Lack of backup generators

While some cell phone towers have generators that click on in an emergency, many do not, Harris said.

鈥淚n the event of a loss of power, the assumption is the loss of power will be temporary and you don鈥檛 have to have a backup because, shortly thereafter, the power will come back on. So, after the batteries died, they didn鈥檛 have any power at all to service anybody unless they had a generator available.鈥�

But, even then, Harris said, generators are not a complete fail-safe.

鈥�(One service provider) recognized that they did have generators that didn鈥檛 click on, so they sent servicemen out to the cell sites to turn on the generators.鈥�

Trouble at home

Compounding the problem is the fact that cell phone users weren鈥檛 the only ones without phone-calling capabilities 鈥� anyone with a wireless phone at home suffered, too.

鈥淲ireless phones also went dead because 鈥� not that the lines to the house weren鈥檛 working 鈥� but you didn鈥檛 have electricity to run the radio frequency part of the link,鈥� Harris said. 鈥淪o it鈥檚 not enough just to have a wired line, you need to have a physically wired line instead of a radio frequency link.鈥�

To circumvent the problem, Harris had two suggestions, including having an 鈥渙ld-style phone鈥� physically connected to a landline.

鈥淭hat鈥檚 no assurance that the normal phone company can鈥檛 go down also, but they are some of the most reliable people in the world 鈥� they know how to build equipment that lasts, so that would be the last one that would fail.鈥�

Try texting next time

And when it comes to cell phone use, Harris noted one handy tip: texting.

鈥淵ou can text because the system can handle many, many more text users than they can voice users and that way you don鈥檛 flood the system; you can still get a connection. So texting is another option that people should back up to.鈥�

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