One of my recent blogs talked about the reliability of cellular data as a substitute for wireline broadband. Almost immediately I had an example of a wireless outage shoved in my face. I was in Phoenix at an all-day meeting. When I left at about 4:00 I tried my Uber app and it wasn’t working. The app cycled through but would not find a driver. This was inconvenient because I was standing in the 100-degree sun, so I immediately looked for shade. I tried a few more times. Giving up on Uber I tried Lyft and got the same results. Now I’m figuring a data outage, but since Android phones are sometimes squirrelly, to be safe I rebooted my phone.

That didn’t work and I was standing waiting in hot weather to get a ride to my hotel which was 20-miles away. Uber, Lyft and taxis were out of the question. Luckily my voice was still working, so I called my wife who ordered an Uber for me. But had she not been available I’m not sure how I would have gotten to my hotel. I’m picturing the huge number of other people this also inconvenienced. How many people landed at an airport and couldn’t get a ride? How many people were driving and suddenly lost access to their mapping software? How many businessmen were traveling and couldn’t read or respond to email?

When I got back to a landline connection I looked at the AT&T outage website and it was lit up like a Christmas tree. It looked like the east coast was totally out, but almost every other NFL city also showed an outage. Phoenix, which I knew to be out, didn’t even show on the map as having a problem, and it’s possible that the whole nationwide AT&T network had a data outage. A few days later I checked and AT&T had said nothing about the cause of the outage. Their outage website shows a 17-hour outage that day, without specifying the extent or the reason for the outage.

There is obviously something shoddy in the AT&T national network if an event of any kind can knock out the whole nationwide data network for that long. It’s hard to believe that the company would not have redundant backup for every critical system that is needed to keep the network functioning. There are only a few possible explanations. Possibly some critical component of data routing failed, such as their DNS system that routes Internet traffic for cellphones. The company might also have gone too far with software defined networking and created some new points of failure that could affect the whole network. Or the company had a major fiber cut that feeds the site of one of those key network systems. There is no excuse for any of these possibilities, and a company with nearly 160 million customers ought to have redundancy for every critical component of their wireless network.

I contrast this to the hundreds of companies I know with landline broadband networks. All of my clients worry about total network failure and they work hard to avoid it. Unless they are geographically isolated, most of my clients have redundant routes between their network and the Internet. They generally have redundancy of key routers and switches to keep critical functions operational. Most of my clients have almost no outages that are not caused in the last mile. Local broadband networks are always susceptible to cable cuts in the last mile. But those cuts, by design, only knock out customers who are ‘downstream’ from the cut. It’s becoming extremely rare for my clients to have a total network outage, and if they do they usually take steps to stop it from happening a second time.

The press is in love with wireless right now and there are dozens of articles every month declaring how wireless is our future. Cellphones are going to become blazingly fast and 5G will fill in the gaps where cellular isn’t good enough. I’ve written enough blogs about this that you probably know that I think we are still a number of years away from seeing such wireless technologies.

But this outage makes me wonder about whether people will ever fully trust wireless technologies if they are operated by the big ISPs. The big ISPs are cavalier about network outages and they seem to suppose that their customers will just accept them. If my ISP clients had a 17-hour outage they would have taken steps after the outage to made amends with customers. They would have explained the cause of the outage and talked about their plans to make sure that it didn’t happen again. They likely would have given every customer a day’s credit on their bill for the downtime.

It astounds me that something like this outage could happen. If I was the head of AT&T, heads would have rolled after this was fixed. There is no excuse for a company with a $23 billion annual capital budget to have a network that is vulnerable to a widespread outage. The only reason the company could have such outages is that they don’t place value on redundancy. Until the big ISPs can make their wireless networks as reliable as landline networks I will never consider using them for broadband. I can’t see customers sticking with a 5G network that has a 17-hour outage. Broadband is now critical to many of us and I expect outages to be measured in minutes, not in hours or days.