Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Yesterday, me and my family went to the Obama pre-inaugural concert on the Mall in Washington DC.  We live just a half hour or so from downtown, so we just had to hop on the metro and we were there in no time.  The concert was great, even from a half-mile away.  Just being near huge numbers of incredibly enthusiastic people was heart-warming and exciting.  And the music was pretty good too!

The one thing that didn’t turn out as well as expected was my phone’s data capabilities.  In the scheme of things this is of course a very minor annoyance, but for those of us who are gadget and technology-obsessed, I thought it was still an interesting tidbit to write about.  My phone in general was not working well.  It said I had a data connection but when I tried to browse to a web site or even retrieve email, it would sit there just trying to connect.  I did manage to make one phone call early on, but when my wife tried later in the concert, she had no luck.  Even my text message I sent in the middle of the concert didn’t go through!

I had originally wanted to post some pictures “live” on facebook, and maybe even some videos to my qik.com group.  But the phone problems thwarted me and my phone became basically a $300 pocket-watch for most of the concert.

Later it dawned on me (ok, so I’m a little slow!) that the reason for all these problems was undoubtedly because the cell towers around the Mall were overwhelmed by the hundreds of thousands of people, most of whom at cell phones and probably half of whom were trying to text, email, send pictures, browse to their facebook or twitter accounts, etc., etc.  I’d never really thought about how population density needs to be taken into consideration when deciding where to place cell towers and how many to place.  Obviously these towers have a limit to how many connections they can handle, and hundreds of thousands is well above that limit!  What’s interesting is actually dealing with these temporary surges in population density.  These surges are not very often and they don’t happen (predictably) except for in a few places, like the Washington DC Mall and other large public squares. I would think that for such events, the carriers would be able to set up temporary mobile towers in order to handle such increased bandwidth, and for all I know they did, but even so, it didn’t seem to help much.

I wonder if the new 4G technologies of Wimax and LTE will have higher bandwidth per tower, because they certainly are tauting their longer range (and thus the ability to serve larger areas with just one tower) as part of their advantage.  So, hopefully if the bandwidth remains the same for these, they won’t be using these longer-range capabilities as an excuse to remove towers in order to save money, or we all may be experiencing the types of outages I did yesterday on a regular basis!

Update:  I just saw this article on the NY Times which is about just this issue.  According to the article, carriers have been preparing for this and are adding radios to cell towers.  Maybe these radios had not yet been turned on by yesterday, but if they had, then our experience at least shows that they are woefully inadequate to account for the increase in bandwidth.  At least, that is, for our carrier, Sprint…