{"id":22856,"date":"2016-03-14T08:01:54","date_gmt":"2016-03-14T15:01:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/gci-cell-customers-struggle-with-outages\/"},"modified":"2016-03-14T08:01:54","modified_gmt":"2016-03-14T15:01:54","slug":"gci-cell-customers-struggle-with-outages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/gci-cell-customers-struggle-with-outages\/","title":{"rendered":"GCI cell customers struggle with outages"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>BETHEL \u2014 <\/strong>Customers with Alaska telecommunications company General Communication, Inc. say they have experienced frequent outages all winter.<\/p>\n<p>Cellular service was spotty over the winter months around the Kuskokwim communities, customers say, even as some communities were upgraded from 2G to 3G, KYUK-AM reported.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe cell service just going out for a while and then throughout the day, my messages aren\u2019t being sent, and my phone call are getting cut off,\u201d said Shantell Kinegak, of Bethel.<\/p>\n<p>For areas that were upgraded, cell service has also been problematic.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cEver since 3G services went up in Tunt the service hasn\u2019t been good, the cell signal drops in and out constantly,\u201d said Charlie Andrew, whose village of Tuntutuliak near the mouth of the Kuskokwim was upgraded recently.<\/p>\n<p>GCI Spokesman David Morris said some of the outages can be attributed to high traffic on the network as people flock to social media and emails on the new 3G service.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhen you get that type of congestion taking place you are going to have problems in particular with your data applications,\u201d Morris said.<\/p>\n<p>An influx of spam emails and messages slowed the network temporarily, Morris said, but that issue has been resolved.<\/p>\n<p>Outages could also be caused by bad weather, or solar activity, Morris said. But most people in the Yukon-Kuskokwim region are connected through the ground network known as TERRA and shouldn\u2019t be affected. <\/p>\n<p>GCI recently increased its network\u2019s bandwidth, and data services should improve after the ground network expansion is completed by 2017, Morris said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>BETHEL \u2014 Customers with Alaska telecommunications company General Communication, Inc. say they have experienced frequent outages all winter. Cellular service was spotty over the winter months around the Kuskokwim communities, customers say, even as some communities were upgraded from 2G to 3G, KYUK-AM reported. \u201cThe cell service just going out for a while and then &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/gci-cell-customers-struggle-with-outages\/\" class=\"wp-embed-more\" target=\"_top\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">GCI cell customers struggle with outages<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[230],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-22856","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-state-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22856"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22856\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22856"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=22856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}