Alarm Industry Faces Outages as AT&T 3G Sunset Starts

The alarm industry had outages after AT&T started shutting down its 3G network Tuesday, Connect America Chief Operating Officer John Brady told us Wednesday, speaking on behalf of the Alarm Industry Communications Committee (AICC). As expected, the FCC didn’t order a delay (see 2202180067).

“Clearly the sunset has begun,” Brady said: “We have not been told by AT&T or given any of their plans yet, which is totally unfortunate.” The FCC and some members of Congress, including Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., are pressing AT&T to provide more information, he said. AT&T and Schumer’s office didn’t comment.

"We are continuing to actively monitor this transition and work with stakeholders to ensure that it is completed in a manner that advances the public interest,” an FCC spokesperson emailed Wednesday.

Last week, AT&T agreed to allow IoT devices to continue to roam using T-Mobile’s network. The alarm industry found a few aggregators that could help with that transition but is finding that only customers on the Cisco Jasper platform with AT&T, with the right SIM chip, are able to roam on the T-Mobile network, Brady said. “The problem is that very few of our industry systems are sitting on the Jasper system and even fewer have that special chip in them,” he said. On Tuesday Brady said he lost contact with all of his customers in Canada, who weren’t supposed to be affected, and it took about five hours to restore connectivity.

The alarm industry is pressing AT&T for more details on which markets will be shut down first, Brady said: “This is clearly a rollout. This is not a light switch as [AT&T's] communications would like you to think.” The alarm industry suspects AT&T started with Atlanta or Dallas based on anecdotal evidence but doesn’t know for sure, Brady said. “I'm sure that I’m going hear from some son or daughter next week” of an elderly person who called for help and “and you guys didn’t come,” he said: “It’ll take a while for it to bubble up. Exactly what we told everyone was going to happen is going to happen.”

“There is a possibility of a solution, proposed by AT&T, which could benefit T-Mobile, but there are timing hurdles in the implementation,” New Street’s Blair Levin told investors in a recent note. “The big question mark to us is whether the damage actually occurs and reaches the headlines, again putting the mobile industry (and FCC) on defense for not paying sufficient attention to public safety,” he said: “If so, it could affect future rules governing transitions. It also could have an impact on the public debate about the classification of ISPs.”

Many posted on Twitter about the shutdown this week, but there were few reports of problems so far. “First, the clock that I've had for nearly 30 years has taken its last gasp,” tweeted Eric Lorenz, who attached photos of a flip-top phone and aging alarm clock: “Today, the phone I've had since 2009 outlived AT&T's 3G shutdown.”

“If you have a phone that’s designed for our 3G network and isn’t compatible with our 4G LTE HD Voice network, you will have to upgrade before the complete shutdown of our 3G network,” AT&T’s Cricket Wireless warned consumers Wednesday.

Others warned about the effect on some connected cars. “Millions of connected cars will simply stop phoning home as cellular radio towers quit transmitting a compatible signal with in-vehicle hardware, and the fancy features that rely on that 3G signal -- things like in-nav traffic and location data, WiFi hotspots, emergency call services, remote lock/unlock functions, smartphone app connectivity, voice assistants, and more -- will stop working,” said arabeblog.com.