Sure, the cell phone towers have batteries. They're likely fine for a
number of hours of outage - but Gouverneur had no power for over two weeks.
Those batteries aren't designed to last for weeks of drain without recharge.
In this country, an engineer could well be fired for overdesigning something
(that costs money). Likewise, those batteries are there to keep things
working for a *short* power outage. It would cost too much to design those
cell towers to run on batteries for weeks on end with no recharging in that
period. It probably wouldn't have mattered much anyways as the conventional
phone lines were out too - and cell phones are wireless only between the
user and the tower. BTW, unless you had your own generator and were on
two-way satellite internet, you wouldn't have the internet either. No
telephone, no dial-up, no DSL. I have no idea how well any cable systems
made out, but with the telephone system down I don't know if they had any
way to get information out of the area.


73 from Rochester, NY
Jim AA2QA


"JJ" wrote in message
...
You mean that Amateur Radio withstood the ravages of the storm and the
cell network did not! Looks like Amateur Radio was there when needed
again, but the cell network just couldn't hack it.


I guess the batteries for the cell network hadn't been charged up in
prep for an emergency.




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