Horrible service during power outage

[davelewis]

Hi,

This past friday my neighbourhood got hit by a thunderstorm. Nothing unexpected during a summer heat wave.  During that storm we lost power at my house.  This outage lasted about 7 hours.  The Question I have is that as soon as the power went out (6:21 pm), I lost all data on all my devices (both my wife's phone and mine).  While I still had service, and I could make a voice call anything else was questinoable. Text messages were hit and miss if people got them, MMS messages did not go and we most certainly couldn't use any true data.  We also rebooted both devcies several times.

I can understand that under an extended outage service could be impacted (tower batteries die etc etc), but to loose all data instantly is something I've never experienced before with any of my other carriers.  For what it's worth I'm in Barrhaven Ontario (a Suburb of Ottawa) and the phones were reporting that they were on Videotron not a partner network.  While internet is not a critical part of life, it tends to be the go to option for getting updates on power outages and bad weather status's.

Can someone explain to me the cuase of this ? and is this something I can expect as normal operation with Videotron ?

Tks, 

Dave

[Anonyme · Accepted solution]

Data should still work during a power outage. Did you call Vidéotron about this?

[davelewis]

I thought so too, and  I haven't yet.  i have only been with Videotron for just under a year so I wanted to ask the group first before I went to them.

[Kira]

Cellphone outages are a pretty rare occurence.

Maybe it has something to do with the major outage that affected most carriers.

[davelewis]

We had issues last year when there was a major power outage in Ottawa for several days in some areas, but in that case just about every carrier had issues, and it took a while before the issues started.. In this case it was almost instant.. 5-10 min after power went out I tried to report it to hydro and had no data. 

I'll get in contact with Videotron, and see what they say.

[Anonyme]

When there’s a problem, try to call Vidéotron immediately... they may be able to fix the problem right away.

That said, all towers have battery backups and most of them also have generators... so a power outage should not affect anything.