MOUNT VERNON — Having a cell can give the feeling of having a lot of freedom; freedom to make calls from almost anywhere, and freedom from the old traditional telephone company. But some of that freedom is imaginary. It can come as something of a shock when, during times of severe weather and utility outages, there are no bars on the cell phone.

A cell phone is not as divorced from the old telco as most people think. Nor is cell phone service immune to the ravages of severe weather.

“All the cell towers in Mount Vernon we provide circuits to,” explained Jim Kelly of Embarq. “So if [Embarq] has problems, they have problems. Verizon was down for part of the night, for example.”

Signals to and from the cell phone tower travel from the tower to the phone company central office via fiber optic cable. Damage to this cable can affect service, since no signal can travel to the phone company. This was the problem for Verizon, Sunday evening.

“I know there was an issue [with Verizon service] in Knox County earlier today,” said Laura Merit, Midwest representative for Verizon. “The situation in Mount Vernon was the result of a fiber optic cable break. There were actually two breaks in the cable, which is a Time-Warner cable. That impacted service in a couple of areas and was caused by the high winds.”

Merit said she understood the problem was resolved about 1 p.m. Monday.

Service problems can also be caused by power outages. Cell phone towers need electricity to work, and any outages can be problematic. Most towers have power backup capabilities, however. Almost all have backup generators that kick in when power is interrupted to the tower.

“About 85 percent of our towers in Ohio have backup generators,” Merit said. “What happens, as time progresses and some of these areas still don’t have power — when the generator gets down to about 40 percent capacity — we have to go out there and fill it up again [with gasoline]. With the other 15 percent of our towers, we have mobile generators, where, for various reasons, we can’t put in permanent generators. So what we do is bring around the mobile generator to charge up the backup battery. Then we move on to the next site.”

With thousands of cell towers in Ohio, this can be a daunting task for all cell tower operators.

Keeping a cell phone network working can be more complex than it seems, and dependent on many stages of operation not under the control of the cell phone provider. It might seem like magic, but it’s not.