Verizon shot this photo Monday night in the lobby of one of its primary Lower Manhattan facilities.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- A quarter of cell towers, broadband Internet and television services in Superstorm Sandy's path were still dark Wednesday.
Wireless carriers reported to the Federal Communications Commission that 25% of cell sites in the core area affected by the storm -- 158 counties across 10 states, from Virginia all the way up to Massachusetts -- remained non-operational.
Cell service will get worse before it gets better, FCC commissioner Julius Genachowski said in a conference call with the press. Millions in the storm-affected regions still are without power, and cell towers in those locations are cut off from the grid. Those towers have been running on backup battery power, fueled by generators. But in many flooded locations, the generators are unreachable, and the towers will go dark once their batteries die.
The FCC said it couldn't provide an exact estimate for how many customers remained without cell service.
More:
http://money.cnn.com/2012/10/31/technology/mobile/sandy-cell-service-outages/index.html?hpt=hp_t1
