[MNJohnnie]

Communication with state and local authorities in Louisiana and Mississippi was so poor in the hours immediately

Does AP even read what they write? Poor Communictions in a disaster zone? AH DUH!

[Roux]

I work in Telecom in a hospital in Baton Rouge. Almost everything in the PSTN(public switched telephone network) failed. Although we never lost dial tone per se it was difficult to communicate outside our facility. Cell phones were useless and many pagers didn't work at all. We were able to communicate very well within the hospital but the outside world was a hit and miss kind of thing.

Once the PSTN and wireless networks came back on line they were saturated with calls. Remember every evacuee depended on their cell phones and the network isn't built for that amount of traffic. A lot of phone traffic was routed through NO, which was gone. The secondary routes just didn't have enough paths to handle the traffic.

Toll free(800) traffic is not allocated the paths that normal traffic has and the toll free calls wouldn't go through. It was a mess.

You have to give the carriers a hand they did a good job of coming back on line after the storm. I learned not to depend on anything I don't have complete control over.