Wireless Carriers Brace for Inauguration Day
With crowd estimates topping 2 million in and around Washington's National Mall for today's inauguration of Barack Obama, major wireless carriers expect some congestion on their networks. The Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA) has been advising people attending inaugural activities to choose texting over talking, and to delay sending photos, according to an online report published by
CNET.
CTIA also suggested that attendees who are meeting up with others should be sure to have a back-up plan in case cell networks experience disruption, the CNET report said.
The Washington Post reported that a Jan. 18 concert at the Lincoln Memorial provided a good test for the wireless networks. The article said an estimated 400,000 concert-goers "sent 10 times the volume of wireless calls, text messages, pictures and videos as on the busiest hour of a typical day."
"The vast majority of calls went through on the first try," Verizon Wireless spokesman John Johnson told the Post. "We'll be making every adjustment we can make. I don't believe there's any critical capacity we can add, but [Sunday] did help us to do some fine-tuning."
"We did experience some mild call-blocking, as was expected, but with the capacity we added and the number of calls we got on the network and the amount of activity, our network worked about as well as we expected," Crystal Davis, a spokeswoman for Sprint Nextel, told the Post.