Earthquake in NYC today & that's not the only thing that's shaky

Courtesy of nyc24.org

So I made it to my office in Bryant Park today. I made it on time actually but finding a seat has caused some grief. I'm running a little late into my lunch hour with this story and for good reason. Mass panic. I don't want to exaggerate. It wasn't a major panic but enough of a panic to cause a few shaken nerves and some broad evacuations of office buildings across a swatch of the NYC Tri-State area. Go figure when you experience the first moderate earthquake in the northeast in quite a number of decades. But we're not here to report on geology. We'll leave that to the United States Geological Survey and I'm quite interested in seeing the final numbers. Just as important we are here to talk infrastructure, but not any infrastructure. Mobile infrastructure. How did it hold up in yet another major test of wits?

You'll have to hit the jump to find out my perspective...

Courtesy of arstechnica.com

That pretty much sums it up in a nutshell and trust me when I say the iPhone wasn't the only victim this time. Depending on your network your service may have been spotty to say the least or it mostly was nonexistent at all. This is not the first time we've been here and from what it seems it won't be the last. For years the debate has ranged on about cell networks and their ability to stand up in emergencies. In all cases of regional unnerving. Call fail, network fail, carriers fail yet again. I left my office just after the earthquake and only realizing it was an earthquake as word started to spread. Trust me I preferred to stay upstairs but it is lunch time. A 5.9 which was probably less at my location is nothing to be afraid of. But the sea of people standing outside of buildings clutching their cell phones looking clueless and frustrating is a familiar site.

We can recall a Blackout 8 years ago to the month or even the unforgettable 9/11/01. The same story with the same results. I on Verizon Wireless was able to make a call to another Verizon Wireless user after several attempts. I was even able to reach the voicemail of an AT&T user. But if you provide was Sprint or T-Mobile, my call attempts were immediately shot down with the typical fast busy signal I have not heard in years. The call quality on my Verizon Wireless call was shaky, no pun intended. I even took a stab at making a test 911 call. It didn't even come close to going through which is frightening. If I was in a real emergency, I was officially on my own.

So this begs the question to all of the major carriers and even congress.

When exactly are we going to start taking mobile network durability, especially in emergencies seriously?

There's not a lot of time to play around with this. My story lacks the time as well, candidly speaking here the next true emergency is going to require communication. It's a prerequisite of the 21st Century yet we still are working with 20th Century reliability. Not good at all! I have two kids and I have yet to reach my babysitter who has service provided by Sprint. Now I'm not worried, but what about tomorrow's emergency or potential disaster? Why wait until it's too late? Why not use examples like today to start making the investment?

Time? Money? Politics? Who knows? But these excuses are not good enough. This is the information age. It's time for the carriers and the US government to start catching up.

This story is a little rushed considering today's events, but as more news comes in we'll talk more about how situations like these relate to mobile and why the lack of reliability a little later. By the way, things are a  little calmer now. Watch out for those aftershocks. I already felt one after sitting down to write this story.