from the everybody-has-the-same-idea-at-the-same-time dept.
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.’
