Telephone service, including 911 service, for 50,000 Verizon cust...
Telephone service, including 911 service, for 50,000 Verizon customers in the Ft. Worth suburb of Keller, Tex., was cut off about 4 hours Wed. after a highway contractor accidentally severed the main cable carrying calls for the town. The…
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outage occurred just hours after Verizon announced that Keller was chosen for a major network upgrade that would bring fiber connections directly into every residence and workplace. Local officials said residents turned to their cellphones, causing occasional overloads of the cellular system. Landline customers who picked up their phones heard either silence or a fast busy. The city’s 911 center was taken offline by the outage. Calls to 911 from wireless phones or from outlying areas that still had dial tone were rerouted to the 911 center in adjacent North Richland Hills. City officials also activated an emergency backup radio system to provide essential public safety communications during the outage.