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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.'"
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 will still work in emergencies. I recall that being a reason for their continued existence in the era of mobile phones.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
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 ?
They also said that Marcellus Wallace threw a man out of a window for giving Mia a foot massage.
Post a source, or STFU.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Part of it's not just whether the network fails, but how it fails. For instance, in a situation like this the network might be reconfigured to reject incoming calls to the area to keep that capacity free for people calling out. It might start throttling back voice calls to free up that capacity for emergency services and keep the data portion of the network running (and maybe drop the data portion back to 3G or even 2G so it could handle more simultaneous users). You wouldn't be able to call out, but you could still send and receive text messages. And the process for this should be in place. This kind of thing is rare and you can't predict when it'll happen, but it's a given that it will happen so the network operators should have a plan in place for what to do when it does.
And they should also be looking back to Ma Bell's studies on how to staff operators to handle phone calls. They found through a lot of study of real-world traffic that you can't staff for the average volume and successfully handle the calls. Calls tended to cluster, so if you wanted to keep wait times acceptable you had to staff for the peak volumes and accept that that meant you'd have idle capacity a lot of the time. I often get the feeling that the engineering side of the carriers understands this, but the business side doesn't quite grasp the idea of call volume not being a normal distribution.
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.
mfwright@batnet.com
Why It's So Hard For a Crowd To Leave a Burning Building Through The Only Exit Doors.
I mean really, WTF?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I was there, 200m from the bombs. Phone never had issues sending texts, but could not us Google Voice or regular calling to place a call out. Never had an issue with data/text however, which was useful as I texted folks asking "WTF was that?" Local hardwired wifi never skipped a beat, but sites like Boston.com and Letsrun.com tanked almost instantly.
HTFU
In fact, this very problem is why there is a US government program that lets certain emergency personnel/offices have priority over normal telephone traffic.
This is also why we don't normally see phone numbers in the 710 area code.
See: http://gets.ncs.gov/program_info.html for an overview.
(Wow, I feel like I'm back on comp.dcom.telecom)
gets shit thrown at it from both sides. providers dont feel the need to invest in more towers and users understandably get angry when this problem manifests in dropped calls and network outages.
to curtail the issue, emergency coverage services like COW and COLT (Cellular on Wheels, Cellular on Light Truck) have been bastardized by carriers to augment connectivity for sports events and serve as standby relays during repairs. COW and COLT were designed by the industries to respond to hurricanes and tornados but the allure of having a tower-on-wheels it understandably too budget-friendly for any carrier to pass up. oversubscription and markup are what keep cellular industries alive, just like shared hosting or airlines.
the other issue is as TFA highlights, cellular is just not as robust as say, 25 core ASTRO multi-zone digital radio...arguably because the need just isnt there. if 1 in 5 people cant make contact during an emergency its not a problem, cellphones can be borrowed or the calls can be retried. in law enforcement and emergency services, the PTT button has to work every time no matter what, as a loss of service could result in an emergency turning into a catastrophe.
finally, what i consider 'dark devices' can also create an outage automatically. fire alarms, burglary alarms, and even SIGALERT and some EAS systems (yes, EAS, its cost saving/kickback jack-assery found in flyover states all the time.) for the city/state are critically dependent on cellular networks. in the event of an emergency the activation of hundreds of these devices at once can black out the network pretty fast.
Good people go to bed earlier.