[LINK] Brisbane and Communications Congestion?

Tom Koltai tomk at unwired.com.au
Tue Jan 11 16:26:42 AEDT 2011



> -----Original Message-----
> From: link-bounces at mailman.anu.edu.au 
> [mailto:link-bounces at mailman.anu.edu.au] On Behalf Of Adrian Chadd
> Sent: Tuesday, 11 January 2011 1:49 PM
> To: link at anu.edu.au
> Subject: [LINK] Brisbane and Communications Congestion?
> 
> 
> Has there been verified reports of congestion/failure on 
> internet, mobile and landline networks during this emergency?
> 
>http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/01/11/3110450.htm?section=justi
n

>To quote:

>"The potentially looming disaster in the city is being made worse by
cut and congested  mobile phone lines, making communication 
>difficult. Vodafone customers have been  without reception for most of
the morning.
> People have been asked to stay off telephones unless absolutely
necessary to avoid  congesting lines for emergency services."

>Is there any evidence of this actually occuring?

>I know I occasionally rattle a stick at the notion of getting rid of
landlines in 
>preference to mobile phones (as I believe they're 
>both appropriate and useful
>today) but I'm honestly interested in hard data/reports going
either/both/other ways.

Empirically, no, yet annecdotally, I can say that most copper pits are
not flood proofed and therefore copper landlines tend att imes like
these to suffer earth leakage which makes them unuseable thereby forcing
persons to fall back to mobile phones.

Mankind is a social animal and when disaster threatens, invariably picks
up the closest communications device and calls family and friends:

Story from August 2007
Why cell phone networks are a weak link in a crisis

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9754096-7.html


Quote/
Hundreds of cell phone users in Minneapolis on Wednesday evening
complained that they were unable to make or receive phone calls during
the aftermath of the I-35 bridge collapse. But many people said they
could still contact loved ones via text messaging.

This is not unusual, experts say. People in London and New York City
after terrorist attacks in those cities reported similar issues. So did
some students during the massacre at Virginia Tech earlier this year.
While some of these issues can be blamed on damage to infrastructure, as
was the case after the September 11 attacks and during Hurricane
Katrina, more frequently cell phone networks are crippled for the simple
reason that there isn't enough capacity on the network.
...
While it's quite common for cell phone networks to get overloaded during
serious emergencies, there isn't much that can be done to fix the
problem. The main reason is that it just isn't economically viable for
carriers to build their networks to handle a tenfold increase in
capacity in every inch of their footprint.

"People have to remember that this is a commercial service," Golvin
said. "It was never designed to be an emergency network. And it just
doesn't make business sense for carriers to try to build it that way."

In most communities, emergency responders have established their own
dedicated wireless networks. So while you may not be able to call your
husband on his cell phone, firefighters and police are able to contact
one another to respond to the emergency.
/Quote.

I think that might answer your question Adrian.
A similar occurrence used to happen on New years eve in the nineties.
SMS'es were delayed on the Optus Network for up to 2 hours due to lack
of interconnects [The Telstra Optus Agreement forced all GSM traffic to
be exchanged over 10 E1 -2048 kbps PRI's- links (another fine example of
Telstra succeeding in making the opposition look bad)].


Tomk




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