EAGLE COUNTY — A third-party equipment failure above Glenwood Canyon knocked out AT&T phone service to the lower valley this week. Other providers weren’t impacted.
According to an email from Suzanne Trantow, AT&T’s lead public relations manager for the Rocky Mountains, that equipment failure — from a company AT&T contracts with — had been repaired Thursday. In the meantime, though, one of the firm’s “SatCOLT” trucks was brought in to provide service for first responders in the valley.
Eagle County Sheriff James van Beek said many of his officers on this side of the county use AT&T phones. The loss of service required officers to make some adjustments. Most of those adjustments involved switching their phones to Wi-Fi calling instead of using the cellular network. The catch, of course, is that Wi-Fi calling only works where there’s Wi-Fi.
“We quickly adapted,” van Beek said, noting that police and other emergency responders also have a functional radio system they can use out on the road.
Anita Denboske and her family have owned Active Communications since 1996. Denboske said the company’s office in Eagle had received a number of calls about the service outage. Denboske said people at Active were also encouraging customers to switch over to Wi-Fi calling.
Not everyone understands how that works, and van Beek said he and others at the Sheriff’s Office have been showing colleagues how to make the switch.
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It’s a quick switch, but it’s understandable that some people don’t know about the Wi-Fi option. “You just expect everything to work,” van Beek said.
Got wifi calling?
A number of phones have the built-in ability to switch to wifi calling. You can usually make the switch in your phone’s settings. Others may need to download an app to enable calling over wifi instead of the cellular network.
