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Community Corner

Can You Hear Me Now? Not on a Busy O.C. Weekend

Beach talking may not come easy as summer days produce a boom in demand for wireless capacity and a lot of frustrated users in Ocean City.

When Erin Visalli decided to start her own business last summer, she purposely chose to do so in Ocean City because the island has the most available housing stock and the greatest number of rental units among Cape May County seashore towns. She’s finding that to be a mixed blessing this year.

All those rental houses come with cell-phone-using renters. And all those smartphone-toting renters are using their phones at the same time to text message, make phone calls, send email, use apps and sneak a little office work into vacation time.

As the summer progresses and more people crowd onto the island, these wireless customers are finding their service slows dramatically at high-volume times and occasionally fails to work at all. Some vacationers who never planned to unplug entirely are finding that they don't have a choice.

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 “I operate a business that depends on the Internet,” said Visalli, owner of Relax Concierge, which delivers personal items such as bed linens and beach umbrellas to rental properties. “We need our phones, and our phones do not work during changeover time.”

Specifically, she has encountered problems between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. on Saturdays. As an AT&T customer who relies on her iPhone and iPad, Visalli considers wireless service essential to doing business.

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John and Sharon Szabo do, too. Owners of Positively 4th Street Café, the couple experienced a total meltdown of communications services last Saturday, which, in addition to being a high-traffic day of the week, had the added distinction of being Night in Venice.

The annual boat parade draws tens of thousands of people to the island, adding to a population that swells from 11,700 annually to almost 150,000 seasonally.

“We had a problem with every carrier,” said Sharon Szabo, who uses Comcast to provide wireless Internet service to her coffeehouse clientele, Verizon for her business land-line and AT&T for her cell phones. “We couldn’t call, we couldn’t text, we couldn’t email.”

“Even when we were using our land-line, we couldn’t get through to employees because we were trying to reach them on their cell phones,” John Szabo said.

The result of all that dead air time was a few uncomfortable hours as the Szabos, without the convenience of modern communication, tried to reorganize employees’ schedules and arrange adequate coverage for their business.

AT&T and Verizon are primarily coming under fire for these problems. AT&T acknowledges its system is not perfect and is constantly working to improve it, said spokesperson Brandy Bell. She pointed to added capacity that was introduced in Atlantic City and the surrounding areas on May 30 as evidence that AT&T is addressing its customers’ needs.

That was on Memorial Day weekend, the unofficial start of summer at the shore, and one of the weekends when visitors experienced sluggish or nonexistent responses from their cell phones.

“We had customers all weekend long complaining they couldn’t use their cell phones,” said a receptionist at one massage therapy business in the center of town, pointing to the four-day Memorial Day weekend as the first indication Ocean City visitors might experience summer-long issues with network access. “They were coming to us for massages and getting all stressed because they couldn’t use their phones.”

Shawn Ali, manager of the new Verizon Wireless store on the Ocean City Boardwalk, said Memorial Day weekend was the first time he became aware that customers were having difficulties accessing the network with their phones. “Memorial Day, we had a lot of complaints,” he said. “Fourth of July and Night in Venice were not as big a problem, although we did have people coming in and saying they were separated from their kids on the Boardwalk and couldn’t get in touch with them, that they couldn’t call them or text them.”

Ali said he offers to go into customers’ phone settings and find out how long it will take for the applications they want to use to become available. He also gets updates from technicians who have been dispatched to the towers; they issue estimated times as to when logjams will be cleared. Problems that cannot be addressed in the store are referred to customer service at 1-800-922-0204.

In the simplest terms, volume is a problem. “When a lot of people are in town using their phones at the same time, it jams up the towers,” Ali said.

Bell of AT&T uses the analogy of an overcrowded highway to help customers understand the techno-speak of carriers and networks.

“We added a fourth carrier by the end of May,” she said. “Adding a carrier is like adding a lane to a highway that’s congested. It opens things up, adding more access to the network.”

The problem is due to the sheer number of people who rely on cell-phone technology for more than making phone calls. Bell says data usage on the AT&T network has increased 8,000 percent from 2007 to 2010, and is expected to continue to grow. Most recently, she said, AT&T added cell towers in Avalon and Sea Isle City to proactively address customer need, and AT&T will continue to keep its truck, known as Cell On Wheels (or COW), parked at Shelter Road in Ocean City through the end of summer to provide added capacity and improved coverage in the area.

Despite the improvements to AT&T’s infrastructure at the shore, Bell said she is aware that customers occasionally experience problems with their network access. She invites these customers to contact AT&T so the company can use the information to make further improvements. Customers can use the Mark the Spot app, which allows them to mark the location, time and device experiencing an issue.

“A report is sent directly to our network planning team, which will use the data to help fine-tune the network and to prioritize network investments,” Bell said in an email. “The vast majority of reports will go through, even if you remain in the area where the issue was reported.”

 AT&T customers also can call 1-800-331-0500 or use att.com. But that, of course, may require working cell-phone service.

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