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

All circuits are busy now

[GigaHurtsMyRobot]

Please try first post again later.

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:You can thank the COWs

[powerlord]

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

Aha! I didn't RTFA but no doubt the Dept. of Homeland Security was involved in finding all those Cells.

I hope they detained them for further questioning, although I still don't understand why the terrorists were using Heelys.

Re:You can thank the COWs

[gEvil (beta)]

Q: What did the police man say to the CoW?

Mu?

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

[iamhigh]

If they had survived service would not have been interrupted based in normal use, not a reduction

I don't think 2M people in a few square miles all texting, pic/vid messaging, and calling is "normal use".

Mitigating any *major* issues brought about with extreme usage is survival, to me.

Re:I would say mitigated

[niro5]

People certainly didn't seem to be reducing their usage. I was in area closest to the capitol (the infamous Purple section) and made four or five calls successfully. I generally needed to make two attempts to make it happened, but it always happened. The woman next to me also had Verizon and her phone was ringing...ahem..."off the hizzy" Certainly it wasn't a typical Tuesday on the mall, but I was impressed on how easy it was to make a call. I'd say of all the things that should be improved in the future for large gatherings of humanity, cell reception is probably good enough now to be towards the bottom of the list.

Re:I would say mitigated

[jcnnghm]

There weren't even close to 2 million people. In fact it's unclear if the Obama inauguration even surpassed the record of 1.2 million previously set by Lyndon Johnson. This smells just like the "Million Man March", more media perpetuated bullshit.

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

[gEvil (beta)]

No idea if it was 1.2M, 1.4M, or 2M (all figures that I've seen reported at various places), but it was easily the largest crowd I have ever seen in one place before. And the fact that there wasn't a single arrest made during all of it just shows how great humanity can be if given the right opportunity.

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?

Shhh!

[RulerOf]

Be vewy vewy quiet!

If they don't ask why the service isn't getting better but the prices are getting higher, they'll never suspect that we'd rather hoard cash instead of reinvesting it! Teeheeheehee!

---
Sincerely,
That company that would charge you $5000 to send an MP3 over SMS

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.

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.

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

[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: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).

Re:My experience

[oasisbob]

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.

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...

Re:Improving networks

[JCSoRocks]

Why do people assume it's so easy to magically improve the infrastructure of the entire US? Have you compared the size of America to the size of Europe or Japan? The lower 48 are huge even without including Alaska. I want faster broadband and improved cell phone coverage too but lets be realistic. We're a bit bigger than Japan / insert-random-euro-country-that-we-should-be-like.

the real problem

[ILuvRamen]

They couldn't fit that giant crowd of people from the Verizon commercials (or whatever company that is) into the area that was already overpacked. That was the real problem. Btw as for the people who keep saying the cell towers on wheels solved all the problems, I dunno what moron thought that was going to help but there's only so much bandwidth available in the air regardless of the number of towers and you can't have them stomping on each other.

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.

Unmissable revenue opportunity

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Hardly a charitable act. Do you really think the providers were going to miss an opportunity like this? They'd have pretty much been guaranteed 100% utilization of equipment that often stands relatively idle.

As for the content.... more does not mean better. Having millions sending vids and pics shot with crappy cellphone lenses was hardy of benefit. A few real camera crews with real cameras provided all the really useful (ie worth viewing) material.

Re:Verizon

[morgan_greywolf]

On the other hand, I am still trying to find a way to get away from Verizon and onto AT&T or T-Mobile, because their phones are mediocre, customer service is below par, and they restrict their devices.

And AT&T and T-Mobile don't restrict their devices?

Re:Verizon

[morgan_greywolf]

Um, couldn't you just buy your own device and use whatever carrier you want?

Not from the U.S., I take it?

Where's the motivation

[EmbeddedJanitor]

If people continue to pay high prices for shit service then where is the motivation to improve the infrastructure? They might bitch, they might grumble, but they still pay.

Re:Where's the motivation

[Abreu]

$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.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't care what the Risk board says, Northern Europe is NOT a country.

Re:Improving networks

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Why do people assume it's so easy to magically improve the infrastructure of the entire US?

Critcism makes us appear smarter. I remember one time there was a story about a 55x CD burner being the fastest one available at the time. I sarcastically said something like "why do we need faster burners? All you have to do is wait longer!" and was modded Insightful.

Re:Improving networks

[R2.0]

Why do people assume it's so easy to magically improve the infrastructure of the entire US? Have you compared the size of America to the size of Europe or Japan? The lower 48 are huge even without including Alaska. I want faster broadband and improved cell phone coverage too but lets be realistic. We're a bit bigger than Japan / insert-random-euro-country-that-we-should-be-like.

Puh-lease. It's as simple as adding a line item in the upcoming stimulus plan. A few billion extra dollars isn't going to break the bank. And it will create jobs - high paying, stable jobs. And it will also help revive our education system.

And, I'll get a pony in the bargain.

Re:Improving networks

[Anonymous Coward]

IIRC, when I modded your comment insightful, I was also being sarcastic.

Re:Improving networks

[Albanach]

That excuse is fine in the really sparse states, but most the people don't live in those really sparse areas and yet still many are left with poor service and little choice.

If you compare VA and Scotland you get a broadly similar area. Population sizes are within 15%. VA has high population density in NoVA, Scotland has it in the Central Belt.

Scotland has 99% ADSL coverage with a wide choice of providers, right down to many sparsely populated island communities. The Government is investing to fill in the empty areas.

Cell phone coverage is almost ubiquitous in any medium sized village and along every major road. The cities have decent 3G coverage from multiple providers and that is now extending to the smaller towns with populations around 20k.

The same is decidedly not true in Virginia. I'm not suggesting Scotland is an IT utopia, there are certainly improvements that can be made. Nor is it the only available example, other European countries offer similar or better.

But yes, parts of the US are lagging other similarly sized, populated and developed countries.

Re:Improving networks

[ryguy]

So they should build out their network in every city in America to be able to handle an emergency that has 2 million people coming to the area for a 2 day period? That seems logical...

Re:Improving networks

[NateTech]

Israel's cell phone system is engineered to this type of standard. Every time the rockets hit, everyone checks in with loved ones to see if they're alright.

It's really only the U.S. that has major overload issues when bad things happen. In places where bad things happen more often, their networks tend to be built to handle it.

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.