Outage Hits PacBell Mobile Users

A broad outage of Pacific Bell Mobile Services left tens of thousands of Southern Californians without the use of their mobile phones Friday.

The digital PCS phone service gradually was being restored by late afternoon, after about six hours on the blink. But in the meantime, customers who use their phones for everything from conducting business to staying in touch with family members had to do without one of the Southland’s signature gadgets.

PacBell spokesman Steve Getzug said the problem has been traced to a glitch in the company’s database software. That glitch interrupted service for customers throughout California and Nevada, although the company has not determined if all its 420,000 wireless phone customers were affected.

None of the state’s other wireless carriers were affected by the problem.

Getzug said PacBell wireless service was expected to be restored to most customers by Friday night. But some customers who initiated service after June 21 might be without service until Monday because of the database problem.

A recorded message on Pacific Bell Mobile Services’ customer service line offered little insight or consolation to tens of thousands of affected customers.

“We are currently experiencing network difficulties resulting in system busy messages on your PCS phones,” the recording said. “As soon as our service is restored, you will be able to resume your normal PCS usage.”

Officials at Pacific Bell Mobile Services headquarters in Pleasanton, Calif., refused to elaborate on the cause and extent of the problem.

On the other hand, PacBell customers in Los Angeles were happy to talk about the failure.

“It’s very frustrating. It’s not only frustrating, it’s irritating,” said Arnie Keren, a paralegal in Los Angeles who signed on as a Pacific Bell Mobile Services customer a month ago. “It makes me feel vulnerable. I feel so stupid being so dependent on these machines.”

For fellow Angeleno Robert Moring, the outage went beyond inconvenience.

“My mother is 87 and in a rest home, and she needs to be in touch with me all the time,” said Moring, who is retired. He ended up spending the day at home, where he could be reached on a land line.

And the outage caused other problems for him. “All my friends calling me will get a message that the phone has been disconnected, and I’ll probably have to call them and tell them that it’s not,” Moring said.

Matt Weinstein, a PacBell wireless customer in West Los Angeles, who also happens to be a Caltech-trained technology consultant, said it should only take two or three hours at most to get a damaged network up and running.

“In a mission-critical system like this, the recovery time should be considered to be in the minutes,” he said.

The episode was reminiscent of the recent failure of Galaxy IV, the PanAmSat satellite that left most of the country’s pager users without service. “The telecom companies still don’t seem to perceive the importance of mobile telecommunications services to their customers, and a lot of times they will cut corners for the sake of profit,” Weinstein said.

Shares of PacBell’s parent company, SBC Communications, rose 19 cents Friday to close at $40.31 on the New York Stock Exchange.