Engineers working to restore pager service throughout the United States Wednesday would probably look like an army of scurrying ants to the Galaxy 4 satellite if the space bird would hold still long enough to take a good look.
In Utah, businesses such as hospitals that rely heavily on pagers are finding alternate ways of reaching on-call doctors. Some paging services were still functioning, one offering temporary service to emergency and public safety officials. Some television broadcasts have also been interrupted.Engineers are saying it could take two days to reroute the satellite traffic if Galaxy 4's problems can't be quickly corrected. Moving the traffic to another satellite could take three to six days.
Galaxy 4 is a $250 million communications satellite that will have been in space five years next month. It looks down on the entire United States and the Caribbean, carrying traffic for an estimated 80 to 90 percent of the 40 million to 45 million beepers in the United States. It stopped relaying pager messages and media feeds Tuesday when its onboard control system and a backup switch failed and the satellite rotated out of position.
Bonneville Satellite and KSL vice president Greg James said the company owns two transponders on Galaxy 4 and has had to interrupt service to some of Bonneville's customers who use the satellite for distance-learning broadcasts.
KSL-TV programming was not affected. Bonneville, like other Galaxy 4 customers, is waiting for PanAmSat to fly its backup satellite, Galaxy 6, to Galaxy 4's location to pick up the ailing satellite's traffic. That could take three to six days, he said.
Technicians have been able to send commands to Galaxy 4 but have not been able to restore its orientation toward Earth, said Robert Bednarek, senior vice president and chief technology officer for PanAmSat, which has 17 orbiting communications satellite.
"We are still not transmitting," PanAmSat spokesman Dan Marcus said Wednesday morning.
The satellite failed early enough in the afternoon Tuesday, about 3 p.m. locally, for Intermountain Health Care to get an early start rerouting its communications channels, said spokesman Jess Gomez. "At our four hospitals here in the Salt Lake Valley, the (paging) network is down, so we basically are not able to page physicians who are on call or need to be notified of emergencies. We've gone back to the system we used years ago - asking medical personnel to check in periodically and give us a number where they can be reached."
A number of doctors carry wireless telephones, which have helped ease the interruption in paging services, Gomez said.
University Hospital spokesman John Dwan said service has been restored to one of the pager systems the hospital uses. "We were able to get those beepers to some key people, and patient care was not affected."
As for other hospital personnel, "It was back to the old system of using the telephone, and that's working fine." The hospital is also using its overhead paging speakers to reach doctors who are in the building.
Not all of the paging companies the Deseret News tried to contact Wednesday returned messages - left on their spokesmen's pagers.
"We're experiencing the down side of relying 100 percent on satellite technology," said Sprint spokesman Mark McCail in Kansas City. "We're still having difficulties today, and it could be sketchy through tomorrow."
AT&T spokeswoman Barb Shelley said the company's pager traffic on its 900 Mhz. system was still knocked out Wednesday but estimated 90 percent of that service would be restored by Thursday afternoon. Most of the remaining 10 percent, unfortunately, was expected to be in Utah and Colorado, she said. AT&T paging on lower-frequency systems was not affected by the satellite problem, she said.
AirTouch customer service representative Amy Brothers said the company was pursuing a backup plan to get its service restored. That plan could take two days to implement.
Dex Andrews, regional general manager for Arch Paging, said only the company's national service is down. "We have four local channels. Three of them are controlled by land lines and radio links, and they're working."
Arch is offering temporary service to doctors, paramedics and police officers, with the opportunity to cancel after the satellite problem is resolved, Andrews said. "We have a lot of capacity, and we have pagers on those working systems."
Radio stations had trouble receiving feeds from National Public Radio. Television stations also use Galaxy 4 to transmit feeds of advance shows, said Marguerite Sullivan, satellite coordinator for KCAL-TV in Los Angeles. But it was not clear what - if any - television programming was affected.
In addition to the syndicated programs, CBS television, the Chinese Television Network and the CNN Airport Network send feeds through Galaxy 4.
However, CBS had a backup plan to use the Galaxy 7 satellite and was not affected by the outage, said spokeswoman Amy Malone. ABC and NBC also said they were not affected.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.