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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.
I am leaning toward the 50,000 people in the area all trying to call home at once.
That technique seemed to work for my last relationship.
Telemarketing to cellphone numbers is now an anti-terrorism tool.
Uh.. doesn't this happen after just about every disaster?
If you design the networks to work at the utilization that you see after a disaster there would be cell phone towers at every corner, our bills would be $500 or more a month, and it would be using a very low percentage of its capacity 99.99% of the time.
It isn't what is important at the moment, anyway.
As someone who had a loved one in the World Trade Center on 9/11 and couldn't reach her on her mobile until the afternoon, I'm not surprised that a cell network became overloaded. It's happened in other times too.
Considering this wreaked of terrorism, especially to those on the scene, things really blew up. Marathoners calling loved ones and even just REGULAR citizens in Boston (perhaps far away from the site) getting / making calls in a panic, etc.
Cell towers aren't magic, they can only support so much. And since the phone companies aren't using their profits to expand their existing networks then a large metro getting hit with an event is going to overload it... or at least a general region. I mean, in that immediate area alone you had: people living / working in the buildings, LOTS of runners, LOTS of spectators, etc.
Perhaps the feds DID put up a jammer. Perhaps we don't know the whole story. I'm just saying, that an overloaded network sounds perfectly plausible.
Presumably, any jamming worth a crap would need to block SMS, which is why I mentioned it.
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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.
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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.
Totally different threat profile.
A convoy is moving and is a very small target in a very large area. It is especially exposed, and an especially juicy target in a war zone. You can expect attacks fairly frequently, they have to find you/be ready for you.
This event is predefined, the attacker knows where and when the targets will be there. The attacker already has time to prepare and makes himself known on his time table.
This changes everything. In your convoy for example, there is no benefit to rigging bombs to blow when their signal is jammed or even to arm in response to signals from a jammer.... as the prowler is not the convoy and need not be all that close to them, arming or blowing in response to the jammer means wasted bombs or blowing up innocent bystanders, will almost never hit a convoy.
Here we have a totally different scenario. A secondary device triggered by a loss of signal could have huge impact. The devices are already at their pre-determined target. You don't jam, he can detonate, you do jam, they might detonate, point is....you have no way of ever knowing what he planned until its all over.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"