I'M LOSING YOU.(The Talk of the Town)(mobile phone service in New York, New York and nuber portability)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 10-NOV-03

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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Last week, around the globe, airplane radio communication was disrupted and satellite signals were lost as solar flares sent geomagnetic storms into Earth's atmosphere. Here in New York, meanwhile, Mayor Bloomberg held a press conference to discuss some more banal but no less consequential signal interruptions: lost cell-phone calls. He was concerned, he said, about the "frustrating and too common" occurrence of so-called cellular dead zones (or black holes), where, for whatever reason, wireless connections are routinely thwarted. More than a hundred thousand 911 calls did not go through last year in New York as a result of mobile-phone failure, and so the Mayor has asked disgruntled customers to report the lost-call specs, by intersection and service...

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