Sandy Delivers a Digital Wallop to Eastern US

So how is the communications infrastructure holding up now that Hurricane/Superstorm Sandy has blown through the Tri-State area? Not so good.

Wireless phone calls take longer to connect, if they connect at all. For landline calls, Verizon said that several of its central offices in Manhattan, Queens and Long Island had been hit with flooding and had also lost power. Normally there’s backup power, but generators don’t exactly respond well to water. So they’ve been running on battery power. The problem is when the batteries die, the equipment inside the hubs gets damaged and so Verizon has had to power it all down, thus hurting its capacity for service. This applies to things like FiOS, its DSL Internet services and old-school telephone service. On Long Island, where most of the people rely on Cablevision for their Internet, about 90 percent of residents have lost power. That’s affecting access to the Internet and phones on Cablevision’s Optimum Online service. Time-Warner Cable is suffering outages in parts of New York City and New Jersey, where people have also lost power. The company says that as power comes back, they’ll identify people whose service has been disrupted.