Instead, he was greeted by hours-long silence.
Something’s not right, he thought. Phones are typically ringing off the hook; this is typically his busiest time of the year.
He and others — including businesses, churches and residents — in a portion of South Dallas have been without their AT&T home internet and phone services for more than a week.
AT&T said in a statement Thursday to The Dallas Morning News that repairs were actively being done.
“We are working as quickly as possible to restore home phone and internet service in a southern Dallas neighborhood after it was disrupted by recent copper thefts,” the statement reads. “We are working with city leaders and local law enforcement, who are investigating to find those responsible.”
In the meantime, as the outage persists and people affected say they’ve struggled to get firm answers on when the disruption will end, members of the southern Dallas community believe this is a symptom of inequalities they’ve been fighting for some time now.
“I’m in the accident business,” Walker said. “I get accidents happen but this is impacting my livelihood.”
Walker, who owns Walker Auto Body & Frame Shop on South Second Avenue with his father, said most of his jobs begin with a phone call so there has been a decrease in the amount of business coming in. He’s found a temporary solution by forwarding the calls from the shop’s number to his personal cellphone but that hasn’t always been reliable and leaves him having to answer every call no matter the time of day.
“This is an emergency state,” he said.
Walker said he’s championed for better digital resources in his neighborhood for years. He said there have been prior issues with some of his phone lines that were resolved quicker, but it’s a repeated problem. He’s also looked into switching to using a competitor but the internet speeds wouldn’t be as fast where he’s located.
“It’s not just us,” he said. “We care about the community. It’s fixing cars but also the people involved and the greater impact on the neighborhood.”
About a mile down the road, Two Podners Restaurant has also faced lost profits because of the outages.
Owner Fred Conwright said he’s never experienced an issue for this length of time.
Customers who regularly call in to ask what’s on the rotating menu for the day get a busy signal. Those who tried to pay with credit card the first few days after Christmas were told the restaurant could only accept cash because the internet-dependent register was inoperable.
Conwright, like Walker, has found a Band-Aid fix for the lack of internet for the time being by using a hotspot but other things, such as his phone line, are out of commission for now.
Frustrated by days without services and what he said was an initial lack of communication — he was recently told it could be another two to three weeks for everything to be operable again — Conwright began reaching out to local government officials and news outlets in hopes of bringing attention to the issue.
He said he received multiple calls afterwards saying the service might be restored much sooner.
“I had to go through so many channels to get these results,” he said. “If this happened in other parts of the city the response would have been quicker. South Dallas needs to draw the same attention that other parts get when there’s issues.”
A 2022 study completed by SMU found certain parts of Dallas are considered “infrastructure deserts.” Majority of the areas were concentrated in southern Dallas, which is home to many Black and Hispanic residents and minority-owned businesses.
James McGee, president and board chair of Southern Dallas Progress, previously told The News in response to the study that among the many issues with the community’s infrastructure, such as the obvious lack of sidewalks and uneven pavement, is also “digital redlining” where internet companies underinvest in the neighborhood, resulting in poor internet access.
Rev. Kenneth King, pastor of Mount Carmel Missionary Baptist Church on Metropolitan Avenue, said the church’s struggles with digital services have been ongoing for more than a decade.
The church has begun using both AT&T and Spectrum to provide services. King said it’s in part because they don’t want to lose the landline number they’ve had for so long but they also need to maximize the speed of the internet, especially to be able to live-stream services for the congregation.
King said he agreed with Walker and Conwright’s sentiment that the internet and phone lines being down is a symptom of a larger issue of inequality.
“Dallas, for the most part, is now treating South Dallas as a wasteland for whatever their reasons could be,” he said, adding that the church has a good relationship with some local leaders “but as far as technology and things of the sort, it’s not happening in South Dallas.”
King said he thought the disparities in the southern part of the city was a “me problem” when he initially began working at the church in 2013 but has realized, especially in the last couple years, it’s a “we problem” that will take the community coming together to change it.
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