[Sprint HTC EVO 4G LTE] KEYofR:
Yeah my office in middlesex just got power back _last night_. We have a natural gas generator that ran 24/7 the whole time and we have fios and t1's that stayed up the whole time. The piped gas was a lifesaver because I never thought it would be so impossible to find gasoline! As soon as the power was out, all the gas stations closed or ran out. The few gas stations that had generators, just ran out of gas in hours. Who knew gasoline and power were tied to each other like that? Defeats the whole purpose of having a generator! We would have had to drive clear to Philly every couple days to bring back a truck full of gas cans if it had been a gasoline generator.

At home in edison I got power back a couple days ago, but while power was out for several days, so was cable/internet, and sprint, AND verizon stopped sprint users from even roaming after about a day. Go to make a call and you get a prompt about making a credit card call or collect call! No txt or data either for several days.

I made my own electric by hooking a ups to my truck and idling it, then the next day borrowed a proper generator from my brother, but it wasn't good for much but lights and the fridge, because...

Cable/internet worked for a few hours after power went out, then died, and stayed dead for several days until about one minute after the utility power came back.

Wow. So basically, optimum runs on batteries.

They have equipment out there that's part of the chain, that has battery backup but nothing else. If utility power goes out for longer than a few hours, they go down. They don't tell you THAT in the commercials! What about all those people they suckered into cancelling their pots lines in favor of their bundled voip lines? It's not like people need 911 or to reach relatives at a time like that or anything...

In middlesex we have 2 fios lines and 3 T1's. One of the T1's had voice channel problems but all the rest stayed working the entire time the power was out.

Burns me every time I see a cable company commercial saying how great they are.

Any lines, power, cable, phone, etc, could be taken out by trees of course. That can't be helped. But having internet and phone out just because the power is out, even though your lines are up just fine? Inexcusable.

Very conflicted about Verizon as a company. What they did to Sprint users during the crunch was shameful. The exact opposite of what AT&T and T-mobile did. But they know how to operate a dependable and robust network. Partly because, being a phone company, they have always been required by the government to be 5-9's reliable. Cable was originally just tv, entertainment, a luxury, under no such government compulsion, and it shows.

For all that we were lucky. No one hurt and the only property damage was a tree branch fell from very high up and took out the windshield on my beautiful yellow saturn sky redline... But amazingly, it doesn't seem to have dented any of the hood or body or the frame around the glass, just the glass. So that's a relatively painless fix. Although the shattered glass shards all over the inside, and water, on my nice leather... That will be a ***** to clean up.

We met people way down at around exit 7 getting gas who drove all the way from queens. It was like Mad Max for about a solid week. They said it was real bad in tge city, people fighting over gas. Here we just had people camped out overnight in line for gas.

I drove out to Allentown almost to Harrisburg yesterday to try to score a generator and found out they lost power even that far west/inland. Holy cow it was even more wide spread than I realized. Generators were rare as horse feathers even that far away. I ended up buying a crappy single phase Champion off a guy I was buying a sausage hero from in the little micro-diner some Home Depots have.

We are way wayyy too dependant on gasoline. Thank you oil companies for keeping us this way.