question about "cell phone internet" and cable internet

[steve2470]

Last night, around midnight, my cable internet went down. No big deal I thought, I'd just use some bandwidth on my cell phone to browse the net.

I used 3 different phones with my sim card. I went outside also. I was not able to access the internet at all on my cell phones, despite the reception indicators being 4 or 5 bars. Of course my wifi in my house was useless.

I fired off an email to Spectrum asking for an explanation. Is this pretty common ? It's the first time for me. I have not asked my cell phone company any questions, but the cell phone reception came back this morning after I woke up, just like my cable internet. I was able to still place a phone call with my phone.


Thanks in advance.

Steve

[Purveyor]

1. Perhaps a sobering reminder, we are beholden to the masters that control our

communication.

[CentralMass]

2. Voice and data are seperate unless you are doing wifi calling.

You can shutoff your phones data and still recieve or make phone calls.

I find that at times when i have wifi enabled on my phone (at home) and my internet connection goes down, the wifi router continues to broadcast its signal. So the phone is communicating with the router but the router can't connect to the internet. So my phone doesn't automatically switch to my data. I have to disable my wifi (on the phone) so that it will use the data instead of the dead wifi connection that my router is serving up.

However it could hsve been a systemic issue with the iternet that affected both carriers.

[steve2470]

4. yea I tried disabling the wifi on my phones

Maybe I didn't wait long enough, I thought I did.

[CentralMass]

6. It could have been that internet was hosed for both your cable provider and cellphone carrier.

[Dr Hobbitstein]

3. Did you have data turned off on your phone?

If that's the case, your phone internet is only operating off WiFi.

Conversely, if your internet signal was down, but your WiFi was still broadcasting, then the WiFi takes precedence on the phone. If it happens again, make sure cellular data is on, and turn the phone WiFi off.

[steve2470]

5. no I had data still on

As I said above, I did turn off the wifi option, but maybe I didn't wait long enough ?

[Massacure]

7. Your cell phone company needs to connect to the internet just like you do

When you use your cellphone, it connects to a cell tower and that cell tower is connected to the carriers network via fiber optic cable. They then exchange data to AT&T, Verizon, Spring, T-Mobile, Spectrum, Comcast, and various other companies as necessary. It's entirely possible that your mobile carrier's local network was connected to the internet through Spectrum and had the same connection issues you did.

[steve2470]

8. that's what I'm thinking also

I did everything I could think of to get cell-phone-internet and nope.

[d_r]

9. you can have bars

for your voice connection and not have a data connection. Look at the indicator for 4g/3g/1x to see your data connection, not the bars.

[steve2470]

11. good info, yes, I never saw any of those numbers or indicators! nt

[steve2470]

10. end to the saga if anyone cares....

I just got an email back from Spectrum. The CSR totally denied that my services went out. WTF.

When BOTH my cell-phone-internet and my cable internet go out, my services went OUT. I've been on the internet for 21 years, know about cable modems, know the basics, and yes, my service went OUT.

I even called the Spectrum toll-free number to talk to a human about the outage and got a robotic voice telling me that yes indeed, my service was down and they could call me once it was restored (I declined).

Tossers. MEH!




eta: nice map of the outages on August 31st for Spectrum

http://downdetector.com/status/spectrum/news/154568-problems-at-spectrum-2