Slashdot Mirror
Boston Officials Did Not Shut Down Cell Network After Marathon Bombing
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Motherboard about the immediate aftermath of yesterday's bomb attack in Boston, which attempts to explain the (unsurprisingly) poor accessibility of the cellular network after the blasts: "Gut instinct suggests that the network must've been overloaded with people trying to find loved ones. At first, the Associated Press said it was a concerted effort to prevent any remote detonators from being used, citing a law enforcement official. After some disputed that report, the AP reversed its report, citing officials from Verizon and Sprint who said they'd never had a request to shut down the network, and who blamed slowdowns on heavy load. (Motherboard's Derek Mead was able to send text messages to both his sister and her boyfriend, who were very near the finish line, shortly after the bombing, which suggests that networks were never totally shut down. Still, shutting down cell phone networks to prevent remote detonation wouldn't be without precedent: It is a common tactic in Pakistan, where bombings happen with regularity.)"
After the Earthquake in Virginia in 2011, you couldn't make a cell call to save your life, since several million people picked up their phones within a few minutes of each other. Text messages went through fine within a half a minute or so. Something similar happens whenever an unexpected event of note happens anywhere.
SMS actually take zero bandwidth on GSM networks, they use the ping packets that the phone must exchange with the tower every so often to send the message, it would otherwise be padded with zero's. That's why the message length on SMS is so short, it's limited by the difference between the header needed for a ping and the size of a timeslice. Some phones will opt to use the data network if available to ensure faster delivery but SMS was really a brilliant hack to take advantage of the nature of the network.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
In such emergencies, its better to use SMS than place a voice call.
SMS rides on control signal and as long as your cell phone has a signal, it will get queued and delivered.
Voice calls require acquiring of a dedicated voice channel, these are limited and overloaded in such emergencies.