The NYC borough of Queens suffered an outage for people connected to the Sprint Nextel cellular network yesterday. Co-incidentally customers of O2's mobile network around London and the South East of England found themselves with little or no signal.

Both network providers immediately confirmed that the outages had nothing to do with the terrorist threat that was playing out at airports at the time. In fact, the reasons were identical. The cellular networks had experienced failures in their backbone networks. In O2's case, a spokesperson confessed that the problem lay with triple breaks in BT's optical fibre network connecting to O2's premises in Leytonstone, London.

Somebody had dug up the wrong cable by mistake, which happens fairly frequently. However, Sprint's Nextel's problems were more avoidable. Water had got into a telephone centre.

Somewhat ironically the centre in question was operated by Verizon Communications, which operates a rival mobile phone network to Sprint Nextel. However, the events of Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans had set a precedent. In that instance, it was discovered that while the telcomms companies had installed back-up generators, they'd installed them in the basements. And what floods first? The basement, of course.

Both incidents illustrate the point that most people forget. Cellular network may be wireless, but they're only as good as the backbone network cables in the ground.