Fiber outage. It was likely localized to that one tower. I’m impressed that AT&T even provided that much information. Often carriers will just tell customers there’s a known issue and it’s being worked on. And depending on the cause, it may not even really be in AT&T’s hands. If they are using third-party transport (Spectrum, Comcast, Lumen, etc.), they could simply be waiting on the transport provider to do repairs.
Outages happen. When AT&T had that national outage in February 2024, it made national headlines and even prompted an FCC investigation. The last time I remember anything of that scale with AT&T was back in 2003 when then-Cingular had that national GSM HLR outage. And it didn’t even get local reporting despite a group of unhappy customers who had shown up at the local store.
I think as people have become more reliant on cellular, and cellular data in particular, these outages get more attention. I doubt that payphones are making a comeback. They simply aren’t financially sustainable, and the infrastructure to provide a payphone specifically for the purpose of resiliency during a cellular outage isn’t really there. After all, how do you connect the payphone to the PSTN and process payments if cellular is down? Nobody carries coins anymore and a card terminal would essentially be a requirement, but most mobile card terminals are themselves using cellular connectivity. Broadband transport has a worse SLA than the fiber serving the cell site. And who’s providing it? What if the broadband provider for the payphone is also the transport provider for the cell site? Then they both may be down, anyway. And even if it isn’t the same transport, they may share a utility pole or conduit path with the cell site’s fiber, and take an outage at the same time. I’ve seen this countless times where companies build whole data centers and bring in multiple circuit providers with what they’re told is full physical path diversity – at least two circuits share no common utility poles or conduit, and terminate in different central offices where the carrier network’s routing is intended provide resiliency from there. And then a couple years later, there’s a fiber cut and both circuits go down because maps were wrong or one of the carriers didn’t do their plant engineering right to ensure the path was correct, etc.
The best you can do nowadays is use dual SIM (DSDS) or carry two phones on different providers. Personally, I try to do AT&T and Verizon because they are typically more resilient than T-Mobile, who rarely puts backup generators on their sites. AT&T uses diesel generators and Verizon tends to opt for propane/natural gas in my market.