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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."

3 of 121 comments (clear)

  1. My experience by gEvil+(beta) · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

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    This guy's the limit!
  2. How about fixing just the cities by EmbeddedJanitor · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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?

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    Engineering is the art of compromise.
  3. Re:I would say mitigated by Deag · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.