![\"hurricane.jpg\"](\"http:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/uploads\/hurricane.jpg\")
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Living through hurricane Sandy in Connecticut maybe eight miles from the shore shielded me from believing the damage would be as bad as it was. Much of the state – by the Long Island Sound especially, got slammed. By now you have likely seen the photos and videos of the damage. Especially lower Manhattan, Staten Island and New Jersey.<\/p>\n
Back to Connecticut, I may never have seen so many trees down in my life and many cities near where I live had over 70% of their residents without power immediately following the storm.<\/p>\n
Wireless service has been on and off. I noticed T-Mobile seemed to have coverage issues in Stamford and AT&T in Old Greenwich didn’t allow data connections a few days ago. To help keep customers informed, a number of carriers put out statements<\/a> about the capacity of their networks in Sandy-affected areas.<\/p>\n Like everyone else, wireless operators have been repairing their buildings and equipment. Verizon says they have 97.2% of their Sandy-affected cell sites in service. In severely impacted areas, like Lower Manhattan, they say while wireless service has yet to return to normal levels but coverage is good.<\/p>\n The company explains that they continue to deploy mobile disaster recovery and emergency network assets to fortify their network and our back-up power equipment, including permanent and mobile generators, are keeping cell sites and other network elements operating.<\/p>\n They do warn that telecom and residual flooding issues continue to be a factor. In closing they explain as the day progresses, they expect the numbers of operational cell sites to continue to improve.<\/p>\n In related news, AT&T has teamed via a roaming agreement<\/a> with T-Mobile in New York and New Jersey to ensure callers connect<\/a> to whichever network is most operational in their area. I am wondering if Verizon could be added to this agreement when a user has an LTE-capable device.<\/p>\n