An internet outage earlier this week also disrupted cellular service because the two are intertwined.
A comcast fiber line was cut early monday morning, killing internet service to a reported 2,500 customers throughout the Roaring Fork Valley. Cell phone service on Verizon, AT&T and Sprint was also down.
“We rely on fiber optic cables to literally carry calls, text and data sessions back from the cell site to Verizon’s switch,” said Meagan Dorsch, with Verizon Wireless.
“So if the fiber carrying this information is impacted in any way, it doesn’t mean Verizon’s network is down, it means that the fiber is unavailable to complete the calls, texts or carry the data,” she said.
A similar incident happened last year when a CenturyLink fiber optic cable line was cut. At that time, Centurylink said they would work redundancies into their infrastructure to avoid similar outages. On Thursday, a spokeswoman for Comcast was not sure if they would also run parallel lines in the future.
