Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Mobile Cell Phone Towers For Disaster Relief

Posted by timothy on from the well-seattle's-a-reception-disaster dept.

cerberus4696 writes "According to today's Denver Post, Verizon recently premiered one of its new Cells On Light Trucks (COLTs), a complete, self-contained CDMA cell that can be moved to wherever it's needed, such as the scene of a natural disaster or a large public event. Since a standard CDMA cell can only handle a theoretical maximum of 62 calls at a time (usually less in practice), the network of permanent fixtures can quickly become overloaded in high-use situations. Verizon already uses a larger version of the system known as a Cell On Wheels (or COW; gotta love these acronyms), but as it takes three trucks and the better part of a day to deploy, nimbleness of response has apparently been an issue."

4 of 210 comments (clear)

  1. GNAA Announces Victory over cell phone users by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    lol

  2. Help me! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.

    In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.

    I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 300 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.

    Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.

  3. tro7l by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    mist4ke of electing and what supplies get tough. I hope mod points and

  4. dGOll by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    If *BSD Ris 7o