In everyday life, a cellular connection is an invisible yet constant presence. But what happens if you're cut off from everything? When a disaster, such as a hurricane or wildfire, disrupts networks, that connection is lost, preventing you from contacting family members or accessing emergency services.
"When your cellular phone does not work, and your service does not work, your life no longer works," said Jon Freier, T-Mobile's chief operating officer.
During catastrophes, companies like T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon roll out heavy equipment -- robust satellite trucks, drones and portable generators -- and dispatch professionals to reconnect networks and aid those affected.
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T-Mobile invited me to its headquarters in Bellevue, Washington, for an inside look at how the company responds when network connections are upended. Large-scale disasters require significant, ongoing resources and year-round teams of emergency response professionals. I got to see the hardware and coordination required to restore communication when it matters the most.
We mostly think of wireless carriers as the corporations behind our phone, network and mobile services, the names that bill us each month for these necessities. But when speaking with T-Mobile's emergency responders, as well as rapid-recovery professionals from other companies, it became clear that it's never business as usual in a disaster zone. Restoring connection amid chaos requires a next-level of resources -- and commitment.
A SatCOLT and other response vehicles were parked outside T-Mobile headquarters.
Resources that can be deployed ASAP
During my visit, T-Mobile showcased a sampling of its emergency equipment, including a SatCOLT (satellite cell on a light truck), a support truck towing a Wi-Fi-enabled trailer with charging stations, and a flight operations trailer with an assortment of aerial vehicles. Buzzing above was a large drone, tethered by a cable, hovering 50 feet in the air.
T-Mobile brought a sampling of emergency response vehicles to its headquarters.
Other resources included towed trailers that can create a 1-mile wireless network known as SatCOWs (satellite cellular on wheels), and RVs where T-Mobile employees and first responders can sleep during operations.
It's not all big hardware. The company also brings phones and emergency bags containing portable chargers, cables, power adapters and headlamps.
During the 2023 Maui wildfires, for example, residents had to evacuate so quickly that many left with just the clothes they were wearing -- no ID, cash or phone. T-Mobile handed out phones and emergency bags to anyone who needed them, regardless of whether they were T-Mobile customers.
During disasters, T-Mobile hands out emergency bags like this containing a phone charger, cables, battery bank and a headlamp.
T-Mobile's resources are strategically staged across the US, with higher concentrations in high-risk regions, such as the Southeast (hurricanes), the Midwest (tornadoes), as well as the West and Northwest (wildfires). Following the Maui fires, the company also beefed up its presence in Hawaii.
I was surprised to learn that T-Mobile's emergency response program isn't supplemented by grants or federal dollars. It's all borne by the company.
"What we're funding here is effectiveness, not really efficiency," Freier told me. "I'll look for other areas of the business for efficiency to be able to fund the effectiveness."
Jon Freier, T-Mobile's chief operating officer, interviewed in front of a community support vehicle.
Dispatching on 'gray sky' days
Members of T-Mobile's emergency management teams frequently referred to "gray sky" and "blue sky" days: gray for storms and other active incidents, blue for the other days spent training, marshaling resources and preparing for the next gray day.
To reestablish critical infrastructure on gray sky days when a natural disaster hits, many competing interests are at play, including first responders, local and federal government agencies, and companies like T-Mobile, requiring communication and coordination up and down the line. That's where Nicole Hudnet gets involved.
Hudnet is the national lead for T-Mobile's Emergency Response team and also serves as its ESF-2 (Emergency Support Function No. 2) liaison between the company and the US government during disasters and emergencies. She has been covering incidents for 28 years, from Hurricane Katrina to the Maui wildfires, as well as major events like the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.
Nicole Hudnet, national lead for T-Mobile's Emergency Response team, explains how the company responds to disasters.
After Hurricane Helene in September 2024, the devastation was so massive that North Carolina Emergency Management asked all cellular carriers to "divide and conquer" according to the greatest needs.
"On a gray sky day, I am there [on site], and our emergency response teams are often there shoulder to shoulder with our industry partners," Hudnet said. "The goal is to serve our communities, however that happens."
To help me understand how T-Mobile deploys its resources, Hudnet walked me through the company's initial response to Helene. It started with North Carolina state responders identifying three counties that had been completely cut off. The storm had knocked out or disrupted cellular towers in various locations, leading to over 3,400 cell site inspections to determine the extent of the damage.
Deploying a mobile generator in a hurricane-affected area.
"Disasters always start and end locally," she told me, noting that her team works directly at the city, county, state and federal levels to coordinate responses and determine when it's safe and reasonable to arrive in a disaster area.
T-Mobile sent teams with SatCOLTs to establish communication with responders in affected communities, including at fire stations and a hospital.
T-Mobile rolled out a SatCOLT (satellite cell on light truck) to a nearby fire station to demonstrate its capabilities.
Because electricity is often one of the first resources to fail during a disaster, the company brought in mobile generators to provide power to the hospital. In the days following the hurricane, the temporary infrastructure played a crucial role in refilling medications and accessing patient medical records. At other locations, it enabled ATM and point-of-sale terminals to get running again.
"You don't have communications without power. You don't have power without communication," Hudnet said. "Communities were running out of cash. Without cash, you can't get fuel, you can't get water, you can't get building supplies."
A support trailer like this includes 80 ports for charging and storage for emergency bags and other equipment.
Strategizing on 'blue sky' days
Whereas gray sky days are usually focused on responding to disasters, blue sky days are used to plan for future emergencies and "major surge events," such as the New York City Marathon or the next Formula 1 races in Las Vegas, Austin and Miami.
On blue sky days, Hudnet and other partners work with states, local representatives and government agencies like FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) and the NCCC (National Coordinating Center for Communications) to get equipment and supplies in place. When a weather system with a projected path and intensity emerges, such as a hurricane, they stage resources on the periphery of the area to be activated as soon as needed.
Equipment like this emergency operations center RV is staged in areas where disruptions are likely.
Blue sky days are also a call to prepare, strategize and marshal resources.
"We do a lot of resiliency exercises," Stacy Tindell, senior director of T-Mobile's network engineering and operations, told me. "We're constantly looking at how we would exercise a response, and really preparing for that."
Inside the emergency response nerve center
I also witnessed the scope of the company's emergency operations, starting with the Business Operations Center, or BOC, a room filled with screens where T-Mobile monitors its entire network.
Inside T-Mobile's Business Operations Center.
A map of the US shows active service outages, which can be caused by natural disasters or cell towers that are offline for maintenance. There's even a screen dedicated to space weather -- which is a delightfully sci-fi thing to say -- monitoring solar flares and other extraterrestrial events that could impact ground communications and the Starlink satellite network powering the T-Satellite service.
My visit took place on a quiet Tuesday, with a few hotspots on the map and a general sense of calm among the employees monitoring conditions and talking with their colleagues across the country. The BOC staff consists of just 22 people, but during emergency events, additional personnel are brought in and operate 24/7.
Charlie Webster, T-Mobile senior director of enterprise business continuity, explains the types of emergency responses the Business Operations Center tracks.
"The energy level definitely goes up, because in a time of crisis, seconds matter," said Charlie Webster, T-Mobile senior director of enterprise business continuity. "We try to move fast, but with purpose."
In addition to coordinating active responses, the BOC staff constantly evaluates smaller data points for indications of larger trouble. One screen is filled with Downdetector data, monitoring pockets of the internet that are unresponsive. Another is dedicated to Dataminr posts with reports of tornadoes, hurricanes and notable power outages.
A Dataminr screen at T-Mobile's Business Operations Center shows potential threats to the network, such as hurricanes and tornadoes.
(Disclosure: Downdetector is owned by CNET's parent company Ziff-Davis.)
"It's really all these tools together that give us a broad swath view of all the different types of threats we may encounter," Webster told me.
Some BOC team members are "social listeners," monitoring social media to gauge everything -- from online chatter about approaching storms, to how the company's marketing efforts (like T-Mobile Tuesdays) are being received by the customer base.
The BOC is also a hub for contacting T-Mobile employees who may be personally affected by events. On another large screen, my guides pulled up a map of a metro area, showing that 429 employees live or work in the area. When a problem occurs, the BOC can contact them by text message, phone or email to determine if they require support, food, lodging, fuel or assistance from the Employee Relief Fund.
SatCOLT brought out my inner 8-year-old
My one-day visit didn't warrant charging into an active emergency zone -- and fortunately, with wetter weather in the Pacific Northwest, the late-summer fires in the surrounding area were all stamped out. Instead, Tindell and I boarded a SatCOLT vehicle and headed to nearby Bellevue Fire Station 2 to see a demo of the truck's nearly four-story-high telescopic masts and large satellite dish.
To give you an idea of the scale of this SatCOLT vehicle, I'm 6-feet tall.
Don't let the acronym fool you. Although SatCOLT stands for "satellite cell on light truck," not much is "light" about the vehicle we took out. It's equipped with two masts that extend 40 and 60 feet, providing a 2- to 3-mile diameter of cellular coverage. Built from a Ford F-550 body, it's been stretched and raised to accommodate the necessary equipment and navigate challenging terrain.
The masts on this SatCOLT extend up to 45 feet when deployed to provide 2-3 miles of cellular coverage in an emergency.
The truck receives data from two satellite systems: a Starlink unit that relies on SpaceX's low-Earth orbit satellites, and a larger dish that automatically points to a satellite in geosynchronous orbit. For further redundancy, it can also connect via microwave transmission or fiber, if these options are available.
"Everything for us is about resiliency," said Tindell, as the truck was getting set up, "and having all the tools in the toolkit so that we can do whatever that particular situation calls for."
5G radio hardware mounted on the side of a SatCOLT emergency response vehicle.
In all, it took just 10 minutes to deploy the SatCOLT's hardware, which can run for two to three days on its generator before it needs to be refueled. Mounted on the sides of the truck are 1900MHz, 2100MHz and 2500MHz cellular radios, representing T-Mobile's midband spectrum.
All of the trucks support T-Priority, the company's service for first responders that reserves a slice of spectrum to ensure they have dedicated bandwidth for communications.
As the truck was being set up to its deployed state, I wandered over to one of the station's firefighters watching the demonstration. He had the same gleam in his eye, looking at the big hardware, as people driving by the demonstration. Although the fire engines parked inside were larger, the firefighter said, the SatCOLT was still impressive up close.
Tindell chimed in, "Everybody's an 8-year-old when they see them, myself included."
A SatCOLT truck arriving at a fire station.
The drone that flies for 24 hours
When we returned to T-Mobile's headquarters, the drone was still hovering in the sky, drawing attention from employees crossing the plaza where the other vehicles were parked. Although SatCOLTs and smaller assets are fairly nimble, certain circumstances require the rapid deployment of a portable cell site with a minimal footprint.
This tethered drone creates a cellular network 300 feet in the air, like an ultra-portable cell tower.
"[The drone] has that niche spot for those very hard-to-reach places that we can't get a truck into immediately," said Kristopher Rhoades, T-Mobile senior disaster recovery manager and UAS (unmanned aircraft system) program manager. "It allows us to be a little more agile."
The carbon-fiber drone can ascend to 300 feet and function as a highly portable, quickly activated cell site, providing coverage of up to 2 miles. The tether cable, which anchors the drone, provides both power and data, allowing the aerial cell site to stay aloft for 24 hours. Technically, it can stay up longer, but the pilots bring it down daily to make sure it's still in good working order before launching it again.
A drone on display and the same type soaring above, tethered to power and data.
Like all the other equipment on display, the drone has multiple levels of redundancy. If the tether loses power or a rotor fails, it will safely land itself. And if something worse happens, a ballistic parachute pops up to provide a slow descent.
A pilot controls the drone from where it's tethered to power and data.
Given its expertise and ability to access emergency areas, T-Mobile's Flight Operations team is also equipped with additional drones to aid in operations and deliver supplies to inaccessible locations. During the catastrophic flooding in central Texas in July 2025, Rhoades's team provided coverage and assisted with search and rescue efforts. In all, T-Mobile's emergency teams were on the ground assisting in long-term efforts, including two deployed SatCOLTs, for more than four weeks.
Rhoades also talked about Hurricane Helene. "A lot of communities were completely isolated. The roads were destroyed by the excessive water. They were taking mule teams in to provide aid," he recalled.
This larger drone is capable of hauling loads such as food or medical supplies to deliver into areas that are difficult to reach.
Initially, the job was to use heavy-lift drones to deliver food, water and medicine, but the team also set up a wireless network, allowing communities to stay connected with public safety resources and their families.
"[That's] part of our commitment to bring critical communication when and where it's needed the most," said Rhoades.
Technological advancements have changed emergency response
As I spoke with these veterans of numerous deployments, one theme that kept coming up is the impact of new technology. Talking about drones or Starlink satellites made even the most hardened professionals light up. Recent technology -- not five or 10 years, but just the last two years -- has changed the ways they respond to disasters.
"We bring out the cavalry, we bring out these trucks, we bring out our other assets," Tindell told me. But applying some of the newest technologies could also mean T-Mobile doesn't have to deploy the various SatCOWs and trailers.
Tindell points to T-Mobile's AI-augmented Self-Organizing Network, or SON, technology, where unaffected towers in the area can redirect their signals by physically reorienting their antennas to fill coverage gaps. Between Hurricanes Helene and Milton, which happened within two weeks of each other, there were more than 100,000 automatic antenna tilts that maximized the coverage.
T-Mobile's cell towers can redirect their signals to compensate for lost coverage using Self-Organizing Network technology.
"We knew it was going to be devastating," said John Saw, T-Mobile president of technology and chief technical officer, about SON technology being adapted during Hurricane Milton. "When it made landfall that night, we lost 22% of our cell sites immediately ... no power, nothing."
With the SON, they were able to tilt cell site antennas not affected by the hurricane toward the areas where they knew customers were evacuating. Although 22% of cell sites were wiped out, only 8% of customers lost coverage, he said. "It's like having a personal base station following you around."
T-Satellite finds an unexpected purpose
T-Satellite is another example of recent technology having an outsize impact on emergency response. The original idea was just to eliminate cellular dead zones.
"We didn't start off designing the T-Satellite system for disaster recovery, but it ended up being actually a very useful tool," Saw told me.
The original idea was to eliminate cellular dead zones, but it turns out that natural disasters create huge dead zones, which can be filled by satellite communication capabilities.
Hudnet explained that during the Central Texas floods, T-Mobile's network was only temporarily offline. But because search and rescue efforts were taking place in remote areas, responders couldn't connect to the regular, restored network. At the time, T-Satellite was in beta, but T-Mobile and Starlink worked to activate it over the area. She said over 93,000 people were connected to the service, more than 200,000 text messages were transmitted and several hundred wireless emergency alerts were issued.
"When you look at just T-Satellite alone, that is changing emergency response for us," she said. T-Satellite is a "flashlight in the dark, being able to get that text message out or to coordinate mutual aid resources or even texting 911."
Support trucks on site during the Los Angeles wildfires in January 2025.
The network and the 'mission'
Cellular networks provide a bridge that most of us probably don't even think about. But when the signal goes away and that bridge crumbles, you can't call for help or quickly check on friends and family.
On a purely practical level, rushing to restore wireless service in an emergency serves T-Mobile by keeping its network up, showing its customers that their money is going toward a reliable provider. T-Mobile, after all, is still a corporation that answers to customers and shareholders.
But in every interaction I had, the network was just the framework. From transporting emergency supplies to handing out chargers and headlamps to anyone who requests them, the network is the mechanism these professionals use to help people in dire situations.
"Sometimes you have to believe in [saving lives and supporting first responders], and then business results and company success, all of that, will take care of itself," Freier told me. "You can't be guided by the spreadsheet on this one."
Keeping the network running is a "mission," a term I heard repeatedly during my visit. It's not just because many of the people come from military and law enforcement backgrounds. If they weren't responding to disasters for T-Mobile, they'd be doing it for someone else.
What stayed with me was the scope of what T-Mobile, other carriers and local and national responders have undertaken. Disaster response is a sprawling technological and human-centered entity that is literally ready at a moment's notice -- all in service of getting networks and communities back to normal as fast as possible.