I have recently been inundated with emails and messages asking about federal agency activity in the Nashville, TN area in relation to the recent bombing on Christmas Day.
My experience in Nashville has been very little federal radio traffic in the normal bands, and I believe that agencies there like the FBI have access to the Nashville/Davidson County trunked radio system, which is where most of the activity will probably be and likely all encrypted.
If I was there, I would certainly be checking the federal interoperability and NIFOG channels as agencies come in from outside the Nashville area. I would also keep an eye on the entire VHF and UHF federal bands for new or unusual activity in the area.
I have also been asked about the FirstNet outages due to the bombing. I have no inside information, but there are some outages reported not only in the Nashville area, but other regions as well. In these days of distributed network switching, cellular phone and Internet service in one region can be switched and controlled by facilities several states away.
The outages apparently did not appear immediately when the bomb went off, but likely occurred as the backup batteries at the AT&T plant began to fail some hours later. Damage to the AT&T infrastructure are unknown at this time, but I did find this information from AT&T from December 26th -
Teams have completed their walk-through with the Fire Marshal and local authorities. Officials have given teams approval to begin restoring power to the 2nd and 3rd floors. After the 2nd and 3rd floors are energized, teams will begin working to restore power to the 1st, 4th and 5th floors. A fuel truck was brought in to refill the fuel tanks on the generators and a Caterpillar technician is onsite getting the generators ready to run. Teams will start one generator at a time. Once generators are running, teams can begin energizing power plants and charging batteries. Many batteries have reversed polarity and it is unclear at this time, if those batteries can be recharged. AT&T Structural Engineer has found no concrete or steel damage that would impair restoring power and service in the building that caused major concern.
Core CBB teams continue to work on the secondary plan to reroute around the Nashville 2nd Ave location. Service in and around the Lexington/Winchester, KY has returned for 3G and 4G service when CBB service was rerouted around the Nashville 2nd Ave location. 3G Data service is still degraded within that specific area. Work will continue with the CBB reroute plans across several locations around the Southeast Region including the Nashville, MTSO (Brick Church Pike).
Two SATCOLTs are positioned on the East and West sides of the NSVLTNMT Central Office and both are on-air and taking traffic to aid in communication. There are currently 6 assets on air – the 2 at the CO plus 4 that are supporting FN Customer Requests. There are 4 assets on route to their respective deployment locations- 2 in Alabama and 2 in TN. One asset has arrived at its intended deployment location in TN and is in the process of being turned up. Another 3 requests have been prioritized and assets that just arrived at the staging location are being deployed to their target locations in TN.
The Roaming Operations Center has successfully developed agreements with other carriers to allow AT&T subscribers in certain Location Area Codes (LACs) to roam on their network.
If you are wondering what a SATCOLT is, https://about.att.com/story/2018/firstnet_deploables.html
UPDATE: More information from AT&T directly:
https://about.att.com/pages/disaster_relief/nashville.html
