Wireless carriers certainly take their fair share of abuse from consumers and lawmakers. Consumer and other complaints range from billing to early termination fees to coverage issues.
But carriers should receive notice for the positive too, and the nation’s operators should be commended for outstanding efforts in recent weeks surrounding Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
Certainly, wireless networks were not immune to outages caused by the two brutal storms, particularly Katrina, but carriers worked diligently to get networks back online. By the end of last week, the majority of wireless services had been restored in areas in the Gulf Coast affected by both hurricanes.
In the past, legislators and consumer groups have pounded carriers for service outages following major disasters. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) has been one of industry’s biggest critics for not having backup communications when disasters, like the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists attacks and the massive power outage in 2003, strike. His argument has been that landline networks and other utilities have redundancies, but the wireless industry lacks such a system.
However, no utility, phone company or wireless carrier could have offered service after the destruction caused by Katrina. But carriers did what they could to restore service, and in most cases, text messaging worked on some networks immediately following Katrina’s wrath.
CTIA chief Steve Largent kicked off the association’s Wireless I.T. & Entertainment show last week with a video presentation detailing the hurricane responses from Cingular Wireless L.L.C., Sprint Nextel Corp., Cellular South and others. Largent said industry provided more than 2,000 field workers, 25,000 free phones and $15 million in donations to the ravaged areas.
Beyond basic service, carriers have made other efforts to help hurricane victims. Operators launched an industrywide effort to allow mobile-phone users to donate to the American Red Cross for Hurricane Katrina relief efforts through a short-code campaign. Carriers and vendors alike made numerous and generous donations to relief efforts.
So while carriers are easy targets for numerous ongoing complaints-both justified and unjustified-kudos to the wireless industry’s many positive moves following these two destructive storms.
