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Cellphone Networks Survive Inauguration, Mostly

Posted by timothy on from the ever-more-robust dept.

nandemoari writes "Everybody was talking about Barack Obama's inauguration on Tuesday morning, and it showed. According to reports, a number of mobile phone networks faced overload circumstances that day until late afternoon, when the chat sessions finally began to dissipate. Having the most trouble that morning appears to have been T-Mobile, and AT&T also had some difficulty that morning."

6 of 121 comments (clear)

  1. You can thank the COWs by damn_registrars · · Score: 4, Informative

    Seriously, the Cell on Wheels installations were part of what made it possible to handle the extra traffic.

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  2. Re:My experience by panoptical2 · · Score: 5, Informative

    If the phone infrastructure is down, then texting is actually less reliable. I think Slashdot posted an earlier story about how texts actually piggyback onto the spare bandwidth of the network's phone infrastructure; the texts do not travel on a separate network. This goes to explain why your text wasn't received until almost an hour later...

  3. Re:the real problem by Detritus · · Score: 4, Informative

    The network tells the phone which channels to use. The trick to increasing capacity in cellular networks is to reduce the transmitter power and cell size. This increases frequency reuse.

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  4. Re:lessons by Detritus · · Score: 4, Informative

    Ref. 9/11, it wasn't just the cell towers, a huge number of high-speed data lines were cut. You can't have a working cellular system without the data lines that connect all the nodes in the network.

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    Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
  5. Re:Where's the motivation by Abreu · · Score: 3, Informative

    $0.25 US Dollars per text message??

    That's just... insane

    Here in Mexico I pay 80 peso cents for each text message sent (aprox. 0.057 USD). I pay nothing for messages received. ...and that's because I am using a prepaid phone, most people with monthly plans have unlimited text messaging.

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  6. Re:My experience by oasisbob · · Score: 3, Informative

    the texts do not travel on a separate network

    From the phone to the tower, that is correct. However, once your carrier receives the text, it is routed entirely differently.

    From what I heard, the reason texts were delayed for so long has nothing to do with the control channel being full, but rather the total text volume being switched between carriers.

    i.e., the text isn't stuck on your mobile phone, it's stuck in a message queue in a datacenter somewhere.