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Some Verizon Communications landline phone customers and AT&T wireless customers in Manhattan were unable to make phone calls Monday due to an equipment problem on Verizon’s network.
Linda Laughlin, a spokeswoman for Verizon, said that some residential and business customers in parts of New York City were receiving a fast-busy signal instead of a dial tone and were unable to make phone calls on Monday.
Laughlin blamed the issue on a digital cross connect that was not working properly due to severe weather in the area over the weekend. A digital cross connect is a piece of equipment that directs and connects phone calls. Laughlin would not name the equipment provider, but she said that the company is working with the vendor to resolve the issue.
“We have our equipment vendor and technical teams troubleshooting the piece of equipment right now,” she said in an e-mail. “We hope to have this issue resolved within the next two hours.”
Laughlin would also not say how many customers have been affected by the outage. But customers having problems were those in between 20th and 40th streets east of Fifth Avenue.
Verizon Wireless service has not been affected by the outage. Ironically, AT&T, Verizon Wireless’s biggest competitor, which also uses Verizon’s landline network to connect some of its cell sites in New York City, has been affected by the outage.
“AT&T is experiencing wireless service disruption in parts of the NYC area due to a third-party carrier’s equipment failure,” an AT&T company spokeswoman said in a statement. “This equipment failure is related to the recent severe weather in the area. Once the third party’s equipment is restored, we expect affected AT&T cell sites to be back up and running normally.”
While the problem affecting some AT&T wireless subscribers in parts of New York City is not attributed directly to AT&T’s network, the company has had some issues with its own network equipment in the recent past. A couple of weeks ago, many iPhone 4 customers around the country complained of slow up-link speeds on their 3G data service. AT&T blamed the problem on a software glitch in equipment from Alcatel-Lucent.
