By ANTON TROIANOVSKI And SARAH PORTLOCK
Three days after superstorm Sandy made landfall, people in some of America's most densely populated neighborhoods remained without wireless service, highlighting new risks as more people drop landline phones.
Regulators and phone companies have sparred since Hurricane Katrina over how best to ensure the resiliency of wireless networks. The industry has largely won, for example, fighting back regulations that would have required backup power at cell towers.
Widespread cellphone service outages across the region hit by Sandy, with some carriers performing better than others depending on the location, are giving those debates new urgency.
In the East Village and Greenwich Village neighborhoods of Manhattan, where power has been out since Monday night, signals on the AT&T Inc.'s network were hard to find during walk-throughs conducted by The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday and Thursday. Verizon Wireless's network performed a bit better, with calls going through in much of the area.
In interviews, several residents corroborated those findings, saying that Sprint Nextel Corp. and T-Mobile USA signals were elusive as well and that they used their neighbors' Verizon phones when they had to make calls.
Yang Yeng, a shopkeeper selling batteries, candles, and flashlights on the street in front of his still darkened shop in the East Village, said his T-Mobile phone was useless in the area. The situation, he said, reminded him of the occasional cellphone-service outages where he used to live, on the outskirts of a small city in southern China.
John Donovan, AT&T's technology chief, said in an interview that all carriers' networks had been hit hard in Manhattan because the landline infrastructure that connects cellphone transmitters to the wired telecom network had been damaged in the storm. He said AT&T conducted extensive drive testing in Manhattan this week and found negligible difference in the performance of the wireless networks.
Wireless carriers have released little data this week to allow broader conclusions to be drawn of how the networks are holding up in various locations.
While electric utilities publish regular updates on the number and location of customers without power, carriers have made only vague statements about the state of their networks.
Overall, the Federal Communications Commission said that by Thursday morning 19% of the cell sites in areas affected by the storm still faced outages, down from one in four sites earlier in the week. Cable service outages are down to about 14% from initial estimates of 25%.
"Restoration efforts in the hardest-hit areas, including New York and New Jersey, continues to be more difficult," FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said. Replenishing fuel supplies for backup generators "is a particularly critical challenge," he said.
Carriers say they've worked in recent years to make their networks more reliable, installing more secure infrastructure and redundant communications paths.
But in Washington, they have fought efforts to make them more accountable in disasters. After widespread cellphone outages in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the FCC tried to require wireless carriers to install backup batteries at all of their sites. Carriers sued to block the rule, and the government eventually dropped its attempt to implement it.
Carriers say they have backup batteries at many facilities already, and more widespread use of them may not have made a big difference in the aftermath of Sandy because the battery charge typically only lasts around eight hours.
Last year, the FCC proposed that the industry explore wireless networks that can be operated from blimps and unmanned aircraft in a disaster. The wireless industry pushed back, arguing such systems would cause interference.
Wireless carriers argue they don't need rules to ensure the reliability of their networks, because it's in their best interest to do so.
They chalked up their problems in the New York area to devastating flooding that, in addition to knocking out power, disabled backup generators and disrupted the underground cables that carry calls, texts and Web searches from cell towers back to the main networks.
In addition, the city's density poses extraordinary challenges for readying cell sites with backup power and then getting them back online when outages happen.
Still, the widespread cellphone service outages in Manhattan showed that America's wireless networks remain vulnerable in emergencies despite a half decade of efforts to shore them up.
Jamie Barnett, who retired as chief of the FCC's Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau earlier this year, questioned whether market forces are sufficient to push carriers to make their networks more reliable, given that ensuring better service in emergencies could end up costing consumers more.
"There may be a price we do need to pay, in essence on our monthly phone bills, to make sure that we can communicate in the worst of times," Mr. Barnett said.
In a sign of the pressure carriers are under to get their networks back up and running, former merger partners AT&T and T-Mobile said Wednesday they would let subscribers in storm-hit areas share their networks and would cooperate on repairs.
AT&T Chief Executive Randall Stephenson visited New York on Thursday to survey repair efforts and speak with New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. On Wednesday, Mr. Bloomberg had expressed frustration with the state of phone service in the city.
"I have tried a number of times to make a call and gotten through only to find it go to a one-way call very quickly," he said.
On Thursday, the mayor thanked AT&T for its help in the crisis. He said at a news conference Mr. Stephenson promised AT&T would bring in trucks that would offer charging stations and wireless connections in areas without coverage or power.
Sprint network chief Bob Azzi said his crews were working feverishly to improve service in New York despite multiple obstacles, including difficulties getting into Manhattan and trouble accessing rooftop antennas.
The island's density and zoning restrictions, he said, often prevented the company from placing backup generators at cellphone transmitters.
Another challenge now: damage to the telecommunications cables that connect cellphone antennas to the telecom network.
"We will do things to learn from this event, to make more investment, to do what we need to do in order to make this more resilient for the next thing that happens," Mr. Azzi said.
But he added that given New York's density and the quirks of its telecom infrastructure, "there might be limits to what you can really do, ultimately."
Sandy has also shown a weakness in cable and phone companies' largely-fiber infrastructure over which they deliver "triple plays" of landline phone service along with video and broadband to millions of customers. In the days of copper-wire telephony, customers would be able to pick up the phone and make calls even if their power went out, because the copper would conduct electricity to power analog phones on the receiving end.
"We're pulling up the safety net behind us, and we don't have a new safety net in case something goes wrong," said Harold Feld, legal director for consumer group Public Knowledge.
â€"Michael Howard Sauland Shalini Ramachandran contributed to this article.
Write to Thomas Gryta at thomas.gryta@dowjones.com
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