[LINK] Commercial gain leading to loss of residential service

[Alex (Maxious) Sadleir]

Hordes of young people sounds more likely than a lousy generator. If I
understand correctly, the issue is not the backhaul bandwidth but
rather the way that mobile phone towers allocate airtime to connected
devices such that as the number of devices actively wanting to
communicate rises, so does the number of errors until eventually your
device fails to register with the tower
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_division_multiple_access#Flexible_allocation_of_resources

This can be overcome by adding extra temporary towers during special events.
Telstra in particular used to provide such towers freely, to ensure
their regular local customers would not be affected. Unfortunately,
their policy has changed recently to try to charge events to provide
such a service http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-07-02/splendour-phones/5566996

On Sun, Sep 28, 2014 at 3:28 PM, David Boxall <linkdb at boxall.name> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I've come across a situation that might be of interest.
>
> The site is a moderately remote mountain gully. On the weekend of the
> 20th and 21st, a "music festival" was held on one of the properties.
> Neighbours who relied on Telstra wireless for Internet lost service.
>
> Telstra's page
> <http://www.telstra.com.au/mobile-phones/coverage-networks/our-coverage/index.htm>
> shows no coverage, but its reportedly usable most of the time. The
> suggestion was that hordes of young people (attendance estimates range
> from just over 500 to 1100) on iPhones and tablets maxed out the
> available bandwidth. I'm more inclined to blame RF interference from
> audio equipment and generators, drowning out feeble signals.
>
> What are the most probable causes? Has any telecoms law been broken?
>
> --
> David Boxall                         | "Cheer up" they said.
>                                      | "Things could be worse."
> http://david.boxall.id.au            | So I cheered up and,
>                                      | Sure enough, things got worse.
>                                      |              --Murphy's musing
> _______________________________________________
> Link mailing list
> Link at mailman.anu.edu.au
> http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link