Cellphone Networks Survive Inauguration, Mostly

nandemoari writes "Everybody was talking about Barack Obama's inauguration on Tuesday morning, and it showed. According to reports, a number of mobile phone networks faced overload circumstances that day until late afternoon, when the chat sessions finally began to dissipate. Having the most trouble that morning appears to have been T-Mobile, and AT&T also had some difficulty that morning."

You can thank the COWs

[damn_registrars]

Seriously, the Cell on Wheels [wikipedia.org] installations were part of what made it possible to handle the extra traffic.

Re:Improving networks

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would they build a network capable of handling extreme peaks in usage? It's much less wasteful for them to do quick fixes (CoW, etc.) during the times they need it than to build that capacity into the network.

Re:I would say mitigated

[niro5]

People certainly didn't seem to be reducing their usage. I was in area closest to the capitol (the infamous Purple section) and made four or five calls successfully. I generally needed to make two attempts to make it happened, but it always happened. The woman next to me also had Verizon and her phone was ringing...ahem..."off the hizzy" Certainly it wasn't a typical Tuesday on the mall, but I was impressed on how easy it was to make a call. I'd say of all the things that should be improved in the future for large gatherings of humanity, cell reception is probably good enough now to be towards the bottom of the list.

Re:Verizon

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, couldn't you just buy your own device and use whatever carrier you want?

Re:Verizon

[morgan_greywolf]

On the other hand, I am still trying to find a way to get away from Verizon and onto AT&T or T-Mobile, because their phones are mediocre, customer service is below par, and they restrict their devices.

And AT&T and T-Mobile don't restrict their devices?

Re:My experience

[panoptical2]

If the phone infrastructure is down, then texting is actually less reliable. I think Slashdot posted an earlier story [slashdot.org] about how texts actually piggyback onto the spare bandwidth of the network's phone infrastructure; the texts do not travel on a separate network. This goes to explain why your text wasn't received until almost an hour later...

Re:the real problem

[xenolion]

like i said its not something they can test every day with the portable towers. I'm with you, you can only fit so much in one area, the only way around is to have them on differnet channels but most people dont have phones that can switch channels by themselfs(i may have to edit this again need to see if i can find a phone that can)

Re:the real problem

[Detritus]

The network tells the phone which channels to use. The trick to increasing capacity in cellular networks is to reduce the transmitter power and cell size. This increases frequency reuse.

Re:lessons

[Detritus]

Ref. 9/11, it wasn't just the cell towers, a huge number of high-speed data lines were cut. You can't have a working cellular system without the data lines that connect all the nodes in the network.

Re:Where's the motivation

[Abreu]

$0.25 US Dollars per text message??

That's just... insane

Here in Mexico I pay 80 peso cents for each text message sent (aprox. 0.057 USD). I pay nothing for messages received. ...and that's because I am using a prepaid phone, most people with monthly plans have unlimited text messaging.

Re:My experience

[oasisbob]

the texts do not travel on a separate network

From the phone to the tower, that is correct. However, once your carrier receives the text, it is routed entirely differently.

From what I heard, the reason texts were delayed for so long has nothing to do with the control channel being full, but rather the total text volume being switched between carriers.

i.e., the text isn't stuck on your mobile phone, it's stuck in a message queue in a datacenter somewhere.