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News-Sentinel.com Your Town. Your Voice.
Opening Arguments

Call waiting

I got a kick out of this report on WANE-TV about the Verizon outage Friday morning:

For five hours Friday, several Verizon customers in the Fort Wayne area didn't have service.  Service has since been restored, but without the use of a cell phone, many people had a tough time communicating.

John Felts with Visit Fort Wayne said Friday morning's outage from 6:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. caused major issues for some people traveling to Fort Wayne for the Regional Neighborhood Network Conference.

"Right now we have a convention going on, the RNNC.  It’s the first day of the event but people are having a little trouble getting around, communicating which rooms to go to, but they’re handling it pretty well right now through old school communication like actually going up to desks and asking for information," said Felts.

Can't go three hours without cell phones, huh? I believe it.  On CBS News "Sunday Morning" show, there was a segment on smartphones, using studies showing that 90 percent of Americans own a cell as a jumping-off point. The segment narrator seemed stunned by a point that seems obvious to me -- instead of connecting us, these mobile devices are making us less and less likely or able to interact in person.

Those poor convention visitors. Oh, God, how are we going to find our which rooms to go to? What? You mean we can go up to the desk and ask? Wow, who knew? I'm reminded of the time I dropped my car remote, which jiggled something loose. I kept shaking it and pointing  it clikcing it at the car for five minutes until I finally realized there were keys on the same keyring with the remote. Insert key in lock, turn. Wow, who knew?

Posted in: Our town, Web/Tech

Comments

Harl Delos
Thu, 10/04/2012 - 7:33pm

I don't leave the house much, but Clear offers 4G service for $35/month - less than cable internet  If I leave the house, I can take my Clear wifi hub to a couple of hundred cities - and use the same VoIP phone there as well..

The reason Verizon is so unreliable in Fort Wayne is that some of the wiring hasn't been replaced since it was Home Telephone.  When did it get bought up by General Telephone?  Wasn't that in the 1950s? 

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