Unreliable cell phone service frustrated Skagway residents last summer.
Some hope emerged in October, when AT&T announced plans to upgrade its network by summer of 2016. But a spokesman says those plans have stalled. And people in Skagway have noticed, as they slog through another summer of cell phone problems.
Skagway resident Andrew Cremata took to Facebook recently in an effort to hold AT&T accountable for what he viewed as ‘lies’ from the company about upgrading its service for this summer.
“It’s just so in your face how much they don’t care about anyone,” Cremata said. “But they sure don’t mind cashing your check every month.”
Cremata says he pays about $150 each month on a shared cell phone plan, but “you can’t check your voicemail half of the time, some certain texts don’t go through and certain phone calls tend to get dropped a lot more frequently, especially ones that come from out state.”
Cremata’s Facebook post garnered more than 70 comments from other fed-up Skagway residents. One said she nearly lost her job because of phone issues, another said every aspect of her tour business is impacted because by the unreliable service.
“(The upgrades have) just taken longer than we wanted to do,” said Chris Brown, AT&T’s Director of Network Services in Alaska.
There are multiple pieces to the AT&T technology puzzle that connects Skagway customers. One is the microwave radio tower, which used to be the only connection between Skagway and the rest of AT&T’s network. But last summer, an especially tall cruise ship blocked the tower’s path and cut out service.
“It was at that point we said we need to do something short term and long term,” Brown said. “The short term was to procure some fiber capacity so that we could avoid problems the rest of that summer until such time as we could raise the tower.”
AT&T turned that tower off, Brown said, and started using a fiber-optic connection instead. The company now is trying to make its tower taller, so the microwave radio connection is more reliable.
The necessary permits from the Federal Communications Commission and Federal Aviation Administration are taking longer than expected to acquire, Brown says.
“Most of it has to do with the physical construction of the site and ensuring the FAA that the tower as it was would not violate the rules because of the proximity to the airport.”
Once the tower is raised, AT&T plans to turn on a 4G LTE network. The LTE equipment is meant to improve capacity between phones and the cell tower. Then the tower sends the communication back to the rest of the network. Brown says they can’t turn on the LTE service until the tower is raised.
“We don’t want to turn LTE service up until we have good capacity or it really doesn’t provide any advantage,” he said. “If you have a very fast connection to cell site but you don’t have capacity to take that back to the rest of the network, typically it would not as good a user experience.”
Skagway residents probably won’t find out whether these actions will fix the service issues until next summer. The improvements should be in place by then, Brown says.
Skagway is in a unique situation, with demand for service exponentially increasing about four months out of the year during cruise ship season.
That presents a challenge for cell phone providers.
“We manage carefully that trade-off between the ability to serve customers during the peak time and the cost of maintaining a network that would be 20 times over-sized,” said Brown, who noted that AT&T typically doesn’t design a network to be perfect at the peak load. “The economics of it would not be typically favorable.”
