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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."
Please try first post again later.
Seriously, the Cell on Wheels installations were part of what made it possible to handle the extra traffic.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
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!
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Sincerely,
That company that would charge you $5000 to send an MP3 over SMS
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
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.
No comprende? Let me type that a little slower for you...
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.
This guy's the limit!
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.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
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.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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.
I don't care what the Risk board says, Northern Europe is NOT a country.
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.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, 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.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
IIRC, when I modded your comment insightful, I was also being sarcastic.
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.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
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.
+++OK ATH