100,000 iPhones Overwhelm Activation Server

dstates writes "What happens when Apple ships 100,000 iPhone 4S in a day? Answer, 100,000 users all try to activate their new phones. AT&T's activation servers are struggling under the load. Apparently Verizon and Sprint are doing a better job keeping up with the load." Adds an anonymous optimist: "The solution? Call AT&T by dialing 611 and talking to an operator to perform a manual activation with your IMEI and SIM card #, works every time!"

Comments

Good service is good service

[Pieroxy]

Surprise of the day: AT&T activation servers work roughly as well as their cell coverage in urban areas.

Note that if you can't activate your iPhone, you can't drop calls!!!

Something's coded stupidly methink

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

"Activating" a cellphone means little less than recovering a few personal details from the new customer, the phone's serial number or equivalent, stuffing everything in a database, working out some magic number based on some algorithm and send it back to the phone. Big deal... I can write an application like that without even being a specialist and not hose a small server with a million requests a day, let alone 100,000...

Re:Something's coded stupidly methink

[hawguy]

"Activating" a cellphone means little less than recovering a few personal details from the new customer, the phone's serial number or equivalent, stuffing everything in a database, working out some magic number based on some algorithm and send it back to the phone. Big deal... I can write an application like that without even being a specialist and not hose a small server with a million requests a day, let alone 100,000...

Sure, it's easy to write a standalone server to take requests and put them into your local MySQL database, but you're stuffing it into the same database that the data for 75 million other customers are using and probably traversing several layers of API and who knows how many network hops to get to that database.

Re:Something's coded stupidly methink

[hawguy]

Then you're doing it very wrong. Firs and foremost, most of these customers were already identified ahead of time (because they preordered the phone), so you could have *easily* extracted their information beforehand and copied it to the "local mysql database". Additionally, writing back to the "central database" could be also easily offloaded to a background job that performed the work asynchronously. There's no need to have this information instantly available in the central.

While the customers may have been preidentified, their phones IMEI/SIM's weren't assigned until the phone was shipped. And until you link a customer account to a phone, you can't activate the phone. In any case, even if you prestaged the data somewhere, you still need to flip the switch at the appropriate time to make the new phone active, and that's probably the heavyweight transaction, not the act of entering the new data into the database. I imagine that a phone activation means replicating the data across many regional sites. Even though I called it a "database", it may not even be a database in the traditional sense, it may be a custom cell phone controller with a complicated API with high latency for updates.

Since in many (most? all?) of these cases, the old phone was replaced by the new phone, customers don't want to activate it online, then find at some random time in the future (minutes? Hours? Days?), their old phone stops working and they have to switch to the new phone - they want it activated immediately so they can turn off their old phone and turn on the new phone and have it up and running immediately.

I imagine that the transaction monitor on their transaction processing system allocated a limited number of transaction slots to the activation servers - they don't want to take down their entire network due to high activation demand.

Is it just me,

[Cryacin]

or does it look *exactly* like the Galaxy? *ducks*

Wow, 100,000 activations...

[nweaver]

100,000 AT&T activations, out of well over 1M sales!?!?

If so, most people have heeded the advice: Sprint is cheaper, and Verizon you can make phone calls on.

Re:Wow, 100,000 activations...

[Pokermike]

Sprint customers can use the Verizon network. So, why use Verizon?

I confirmed this the hard way while trying to activate my iPhone with Sprint w/o WiFi. I had 3+ bars and couldn't get the damn thing to activate until I accidentally wandered into the 1 cubic foot of space where I could get Sprint's signal.

Re:conspicuous consumption

[iluvcapra]

Something cannot be "par" and a status symbol at the same time.

It seems to me that if you're making this argument, you're just as positionally-conscious as the iSheep (or whatever we'd like to call them), you just use different criteria, no doubt better criteria that is obviously more aligned with value than those other people you don't understand. /s

Re:conspicuous consumption

[nweaver]

As a conspicuous consumption item, the iphone 4S is actually a big bucket o fail: it looks the same as the old one. How many people griped that it didn't look like the "iPhone 5" leaks?!?

And I just bought mine (finally shifting from a dumb phone) for the technology.

The screen really is brilliant, and I wouldn't want a bigger screen (read, block-o-stuff) in my pocket, it can now actually work as a phone, the iOS app ecology is better established, the processor is excellent, and it really is an easy to use smartphone.

Although Siri still refuses to open the pod bay doors.

Re:conspicuous consumption

[iluvcapra]

Because of the level of technology it's become more obvious that it is a status symbol.

I think the iPhone's circumstance as a status symbol has always been rather patent.

The interesting fact is that a Nexus S or a Blackberry or a Droid Bionic are also status symbols -- just because your phone runs a different OS, or it has twice the RAM, that doesn't suddenly make your purchase decision perforce more rational or less status-conscious. The fact that Android and Blackberrys (not so much the second one lately) have defenders and people proudly stating their ownership on this forum clearly demonstrates that owning these phones confers status and attributes the owner with a particular set of values, independent of the actual rational decision to buy the thing.

I just don't think the "status symbol" argument is a useful one -- everybody buys status, and people who run around with Frodo t-shirts and Star Trek bumper stickers (that's me) and hiking boots that never see a dirt road should probably be careful about how they critique social signaling.

They forgot slowdown curves are hyperbolas

[davecb]

People assume slowdowns are always linear, so they get the wrong answers, and under-provision all the time (;-))

Assume a really fast activation in 1/10 second, on a machine that's always got 10 CPUs free for the activation jobs. Each CPU will activate 10 phones in 1 second, but if 11 people per CPU request activation, the 11th will wait a full tenth before they start, plus 1/10 second to do the work. The 12th will wait 2/10 plus 1/10 to do the work, and so on.

100,000 people / 10 CPUs = a load of 10,000 users. Plug that into the queuing equation from which I got the above, and the average time to activate will be 999.1 seconds, or 16 minutes. Not fun!

The actual case is probably a lot worse, with slow activations and overloaded servers, but any time when you can get a really large number of users trying to do something in a short period of time, the average time to do the work will be scary large. Unless they just happen to be within the first 10 callers, of course!

That means that you need to temporarily allocate a hugely larger number of resources than you'd expect on first glance. If you and your manager don't already know that the response time curve looks like a hockey stick, you can easily get into a career-limiting situation by under-planning for a predicted overload.

--dave (wearing his capacity planner hat) c-b

Re:They forgot slowdown curves are hyperbolas

[arth1]

Assume a really fast activation in 1/10 second, on a machine that's always got 10 CPUs free for the activation jobs. Each CPU will activate 10 phones in 1 second, but if 11 people per CPU request activation, the 11th will wait a full tenth before they start, plus 1/10 second to do the work. The 12th will wait 2/10 plus 1/10 to do the work, and so on.

No, that does not follow. Your math assumes that the 12 caller will have to wait for the 11th, like the 11th had to wait for one of the ten preceding callers to finish. That's not true. The 12th caller can take the place of any of the preceding callers. He'll be only marginally slower than the 11th caller.

Unless, of course, someone has locked each registration to a CPU when they enter the queue, but why would anyone do that?
In reality, registrations won't even be assigned to separate queues ahead of time, because that doesn't work well when the variance in time is noticeable - you end up with empty CPUs and slow queues at the same time. (Also known as the slow cash register lane problem.)

DONT FOLLOW THE ADVICE ON THE BOTTOM OF THE POST

[PowerMacG4]

DONT FOLLOW THIS ADVICE: Adds an anonymous optimist: "The solution? Call AT&T by dialing 611 and talking to an operator to perform a manual activation with your IMEI and SIM card #, works every time!" It will brick your phone (Apple's servers will reject your phone due to "mismatched SIM" and it will refuse to activate) and you will need to go to an Apple Store for a replacement. I spent all fucking day doing this.

The 4S is a true world phone...

[nweaver]

It is both CDMA and GSM in the same phone.

All US carriers lock the phones.

But the 4S actually is a true world phone, so after you've been "good" for 2 months Verizon will release the Sim Lock and you can put your prepaid burner sim in it, and until then they will provide a sim if you want pricey roaming before then.

This is actually better than AT&T which just won't release the sim lock AFAIK.

Re:conspicuous consumption

[Moofie]

So, the non-status-conscious Android user proceeds from the assumption that only status-seekers buy iPhones.

Right?

Methinks thou dost protest too much. Why the hell do you care what other people do with their money? Why do you think it's important to belittle them?

Re:conspicuous consumption

[Moofie]

Or, perhaps, feature lists (or "levels of technology") are not what people care about.

Re:conspicuous consumption

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

iPhone User: "I love my phone."
Android User: "I hate your phone."

Re:conspicuous consumption

[UnknowingFool]

Maybe usability is more important to some people than the number of cycles the processor runs. Maybe.

I think it's kind of cool

[symbolset]

I'm not in danger of ever buying an iThing, but I like it that people get excited about new tech things. It means that technology still has the power to move us emotionally as humans. It means new stuff is still happening. The tech can touch our hearts. Otherwise it's boring.

Me, I like boring. I like letting everybody else try the new thing usually - the only exception these last 30 years being the Asus Transformer I bought on launch day. But the idea that tech has the ability to move us emotionally gives me hope that it's on the right track maybe.

Re:Poor state of infrastructure in the US

[Osgeld]

"In case anyone thinks that the US has good/solid infrastructure"

No one thinks that, our internet sucks, ota tv is useless, our power grid fails multiple times a month during both summer and winter, roads are a crumbling joke and bridges and dams are falling apart.

Then there is the bipartisan government circle jerking for a decade racking up the bribes so GE can sell off our R&D to Brazil, while our kids are taking pieces of the road to chuck at each other cause they are too stupid to not even play in the middle of the street, and you are worried about a phone call in a densely packed urban shithole?

Re:Better Solution

[ozmanjusri]

I take it you've never actuated a phone before?

Let me guess, you used Siri to post that?