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

I would say mitigated

[Gates82]

From what I heard they put up extra towers, and attempted to inform people of the potential problem. Encouraging users to not use the infrastructure is not surviving. If they had survived service would not have been interrupted based in normal use, not a reduction. Obviously I did not RTFA.

--
So who is hotter? Ali or Ali's Sister?

Re:I would say mitigated

[Deag]

Density of Manhattan is 70,000 per sq mile, Density of Boston is 12,000 per sq mile.

Re:I would say mitigated

[Deag]

Ah but was Johnson's one really 1.2 million? How did they get that figure?

There is a cool satellite image of it all going around, like here, so you imagine someone could eventually come up with a good estimate of yesterdays one.

How do they estimate crowd sizes anyway, fair enough in a stadium (80,000 seats all full = 80,000 people) but for other things it seems to be bordering on random guessing.

Re:I would say mitigated

[Deag]

Right so after staring at the picture I linked to and allowing 2.5 sq foot per person in the crowded bits, I reckon 500,000 on the mall at the time of the picture, there was another 200,000 invited people in the capitol grounds, and then there are the people still crowding the streets. Picture was taken half an hour before and 18th street still looks crowded in that picture. So I don't know 900k in total?

lessons

[xenolion]

I think most companies learned a lesson on 9/11 when the main cell tower in New York was on the World Trade Center, that they have to have a quick and effective way to get "Temp-Towers" up to handle the over flow and extra traffic. Guess its not something they can test to make sure it works well, lets hope they never have to use it on a regular basis.

My experience

[gEvil (beta)]

I was down on the Mall yesterday and tried to make a few calls to someone who got separated from our group. Nothing was going through. I then decided to send a text message to her. She got it close to an hour later (after we'd already met up again). Apparently it was completely hit or miss as to whether your call or text got through.

Re:My experience

[AndersOSU]

NPR was running a story on the cell phone aspect of the inauguration yesterday morning. They reported the carriers were encouraging people to text instead of call (which I'm sure was only to save bandwidth and had nothing to do with the massively inflated cost per text - which /. has also covered) I will say though that my girlfriend was texting back and forth from the mall a lot, while she had to press send a couple of times for some messages, once they were through, they were delivered in a timely fashion - she also didn't seem to have any problem receiving messages (on verizon).

Data network not taken seriously

[Anonymous Coward]

I was on the Mall in DC, and AT&T's data network was completely down through most, if not all, of the day. Since they have to dedicate channels to data, I'm sure they decided to abandon data completely. Another example of how current data carriers don't take their data networks seriously. They're *obviously* not as important as voice...

How about fixing just the cities

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Yeah, we all know that the whole country is big, but the cities are relatively small. Why is it that people drop calls while driving through some areas of Silicon Valley?

My brother is an international tour guide and uses a cellphone in places like Rwanda which has about the same coverage density as USA. Is that what the USA industry really wants to be compared to?

Re:How about fixing just the cities

[sumdumass]

Well, there is one particular advantage to Europe and most of Africa and other places around the world. They have standardized on one type of cell tech where in the US we at one time had five or more and about 20 different companies competing to be the next big thing. I think we are still using something like 3 different channels and about 4 different types of technology. Most phones can use more then one at a time.

Anyways, this is an artifact of being free and having companies bring Cell phones to the masses long before the government decided it was a right or something. In Europe, they didn't have this, one base telecoms in charge of each country (despite there might be alternative providers) and different companies offer or resell services from that. In Briton, I believe the government took control of the telephone companies in 1911 or so where in the US, outside of a monopoly for a while with a private company, it has always been competition in a market regulated by the government.

Anyways, comparing Europe, Russia, Australia and Africa to the US as many people have attempted to do is a little like comparing apples to motorcycles. I'm sure you can find something in common but they are very different beasts entirely.

Looks like the setup needs to be tweaked more.

[antdude]

If this was an emergency like on 9/11/2001, then this would had been very bad.

Re:Improving networks

[Zebedeu]

It's really only the U.S. that has major overload issues when bad things happen

Depends on the point of view, I guess, but Obama being inaugurated wouldn't qualify as a bad thing :-)

I come from a country where bad things don't happen on a regular basis, but the network here also basically fails every new year's eve, for example, when everyone's calling and messaging every friend they have to give their wishes. In fact I can't even think of another yearly event where the network fails. Maybe christmas eve?

Basically it all comes down to the economics of investing and maintaining a network which is only used to its full capacity once or twice in a year, and for reasons which, frankly, can wait.

I guess it makes much more sense to make that investment in a place like Israel.