VIDEO: As thousands of customers with AT&T, Cricket Wireless, Verizon and T Mobile lost service, how do first responders handle such widespread outages?
“A lot of firefighters just rely on their phones to get those calls processed through to them so if you do have an outage, if you had AT&T and the outage affected you, you may not even know your fire department was dispatched to an emergency,” said Jared Renshaw with Western Berks Fire Department.
First responders do have backups to turn to during cell phone outages. "Each fire department is assigned a set of what they call tones, usually it's two or four, so when your dispatcher or your dispatch center calls you for a call, they activate these tones through this frequency,” Renshaw explained.