Why It's So Hard To Make a Phone Call In Emergency Situations

antdude writes "BoingBoing reports on why it's 'so hard to make a phone call in emergency situations.' Quoting: '[The thing about] the radios is that they have different sizes of cells. You've got regular cells and then smaller sub-cells. You also have larger overlay macro-cells that are really big. They try to handle you within the small cell you're closest to. But it's a trade off between capacity — they'd like to have lots of small cells for that — and coverage — they don't want to put 100k small cells everywhere. So you might have a cell that covers a mile ara and then smaller cells within that that handle most of the traffic. ... In the end, it does come down to trade-offs. That's true of any network. You're interested in coverage first and then capacity. If you wanted to guarantee that a network never had an outage your capital investment would have to go up orders of magnitude beyond anything that is rational. So each network is trying to invest their budget in ways that make network appear to perform better. The cost of providing temporary extra capacity for the Boston Marathon, that's something that's in the budget and they plan for that event. But when you get something unexpected like a terrorist event, or an earthquake, or damage from a hurricane or tornado, then you have trade offs between capital and how robust your network is. Every time you have an event people say, "Oh, they didn't invest enough." But you look at New York City after Hurricane Sandy and Southern Manhattan was under 6 feet of water — all the buried infrastructure was lost.'"

Comments

Summary?

[Anonymous Coward]

I realize that TFS is a copy & paste job, but WTF? Whomever was quoted shouldn't be allowed to use a phone ever just because they can't speak coherently.

pay phones

[schneidafunk]

Pay phones will still work in emergencies. I recall that being a reason for their continued existence in the era of mobile phones.

uh, this is common sense

[KernelMuncher]

Anytime you have a large population in a small area all wanting to make calls, the system will be overloaded. Capacity is built for normal use (which is probably 95 or 99% of normal call volume). When there are spikes in demand exceeding this volume, the network will not work as well (or even fail). Also if the network is physically damaged (such as Hurricane Sandy) it won't carry even normal call volumes. How is this not common sesne ?

Re:uh, this is common sense

[nine-times]

I think everyone understands this, even if not on a technical level. Anything has an upper limit, beyond which is overloads.

I think the main question in my mind is, what our we comfortable with as a failure of our infrastructure? Maybe we say, "We're ok with the cell phone network going out during an emergency, since those emergencies will be rare and the cost of making the network robust and redundant enough to handle the additional volume isn't worth being able to use your cell phone in an emergency." But then are we really ok with that? If we have a bombing in a major city and people can't really report what's going on because our telecommunications can't handle the strain, is that really alright?

There may be other options, of course. Maybe we want to rethink the design of the cell network to see if we can come up with something than handles the load better and reroutes in case of congestion. Or maybe we just want to figure out a way to prioritize certain traffic so "Important" calls go through while the rest fail. Those things are both easier said than done, but they're other ways to approach the problem.

The problem I see with these kinds of problems is that everyone wants to have their cake and eat it too. They say, "Well why should we waste money building out the network to protect us from a problem that's unlikely to happen?" But unlikely things happen all the time, and when one of them causes a problem, they scream, "WHY DIDN'T WE SEE THIS COMING?" We did see this coming. We decided it wasn't cost-effective to protect ourselves. Pay more attention.

Re:Radio

[k6mfw]

CB, and Ham for emergencies. Get it. Love it.

The CB is also a really good way to get real-time traffic updates.

well yes and no. You cannot break a radio transmission like you can with a phoneline or a cell system that gets overloaded. So 2-way radio is good for emergencies.

However, I have been changing my tune about ham radio that its real values are DIY/hacking/experimentation. You still have to pay a license fee (measly $14 to FCC every 10 years) and pay for equipment. You can open it because you own it (cannot do that with many cellphones) and you can modify it as you please (just keep the RF inside the ham bands). And when you have skill and talent to design/modify/implement wireless systems, you can be valuable to those who cannot.

Promoting ham radio only by emergency uses is limiting. Let's be honest, how many disasters occur that ham radio pays a key role? Not many (but don't get me wrong, many public safety officials see amateur radio operators as important resource). So all these people that get caught up in one-day ham cram and take ARES/RACES classes, then wait for the big one.... they get bored and go off and do something else. Emergency planning is important but it is not action-and-adventure where the hero ham parachutes in for the rescue.

CB can be great for traffic updates but for here in Silicon Valley the band is dead. There have been times when the highways backup beyond normal, would be great to call someone couple miles up 101 and ask what the situation is. But this is Silicon Valley and nobody comprehends frequencies less than 800 MHz.

Next week on BoingBoing

[sootman]

Why It's So Hard For a Crowd To Leave a Burning Building Through The Only Exit Doors.

I mean really, WTF?