Cellphone Networks Survive Inauguration, Mostly

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."

Comments

You can thank the COWs

[damn_registrars]

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

Re:My experience

[panoptical2]

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...

Re:the real problem

[Detritus]

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.

Re:lessons

[Detritus]

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.