Pager users get signals straight after satellite snafu causes snags

For a few hours Wednesday the electronic tethers were cut.

People stayed close to the phone, walked inside to pay the gas station attendant and realized how dependent society has become on instant communication.

A communications satellite that spun out of control late Tuesday turned off 80 to 90 percent of the nation's 45 million pagers, and television and radio broadcasts were knocked off the air when the satellite owned by PanAmSat of Greenwich, Conn., suddenly lost track of Earth.

PanAmSat immediately began shifting signals onto its other satellites but said Wednesday it will take about a week to restore service to everyone.

Also affected by the Galaxy IV shifting in its orbit were gasoline stations that allow customers to pay-at-the-pump using credit, debit or ATM cards.

Some gasoline companies, such as Chevron, use the satellite to run credit checks on the cards. Customers could still get gas by walking inside to pay, said Chevron spokesman Fred Gorell. He said 5,400 of the company's 7,700 stations were involved.

Lisa Faircloth, an employee at a Chevron convenience store on South Eastern Avenue in Las Vegas, said her store probably lost $200 because credit couldn't be checked. And people trying to pay with their ATM card had the same problem.

She said the outside-payment system crashed at 4 p.m. Tuesday and was still out late Wednesday.

The $250 million Galaxy IV satellite rotated out of its proper position after its onboard computer control system failed and then a switchover to a backup system failed, too.

PanAmSat would not say how many customers were affected. But Scott Bardell, a spokesman for Texas-based pager service PageNet, estimated that 80 percent to 90 percent of the nation's pager users lost service.

Some ambulance services, such as those in Pahrump and Laughlin, were affected by the satellite problem until their back-up systems were put into use.

Sprint said about 25 percent of its customers were affected between 4 p.m. Tuesday and 5 a.m. Wednesday, but after that communication was back on line. Most of Sprint's system is local land-based terminals.

Kathy Reinhart, with AirTouch Communications in San Francisco, said the majority of its 3.1 million customers were affected.

"But not every single customer was affected because some of our systems don't use the satellite," Reinhart said.

She said the top priority of the company is to get the entire system up again, then it will consider possible rebates for the period of time pagers could not be used.

According to Reinhart, AirTouch is in the process of routing its paging traffic to another satellite.

AirTouch is one of the largest multinational wireless company in the world, according to a company spokesman, with interests in cellular, paging and personal communications services in the United States and 12 other countries.

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