US phone addicts suffer withdrawal

By Emily Steel in New York

Swarms of people wandered around downtown Manhattan on Wednesday, their faces lit by the glow of mobile phones as they walked up city blocks in search of mobile phone service.

As a city bus crossed into a service zone, the beeps and buzz of mobile phones registering messages interrupted the quiet.

Chris Cunningham, chief executive of AppsSavvy, a New York digital media firm lives, works in downtown Manhattan. He saw a rush of river water flow in front of his apartment in the midst of the storm and has been unable to access reliable reception from his home and office this week. He said that not having cell phone service is harder than not having power or an Internet connection.

To connect, he has been travelling 4 miles up town to work from Times Square. “It is all do-able, there are people that have gone through a hell of a lot worse,” he said. “But this is total craziness . . . It proves the power of the actual device and the significance of the carriers.”

The storm knocked out about 25 per cent of cell sites in 10 states from Virginia to Massachusetts as of Tuesday morning, according to the Federal Communications Commission. By Wednesday, that figure had improved “a few percentage points”, the FCC said.

A large number of land lanes also were out of service in New York and New Jersey, the FCC said. Carriers report the outages to the FCC.

Amid a broad swath of mobile service outages, rival mobile carriers AT&T and T-Mobile USA announced on Wednesday a temporary agreement to let customers in affected areas roam on the other’s networks.

Cable operators in the same region reported that less than 20 per cent of customers were without broadband, pay TV and home phone service by Wednesday. That’s an improvement from 25 per cent the previous day. There were a limited number of radio station outages reported.

The sites were affected by power outages, flooding, high winds and other storm-related damages, the FCC said.

“Overall, the condition of our communications networks is improving, but serious outages remain, particularly in New York, New Jersey, and other hard-hit areas,” Julius Genachowski, chairman of the FCC, said in a statement. “The crisis is not over. We’ll continue to be intensely focused on helping with the full recovery of wired and wireless communications infrastructure.”