Katie’s Beer

For the past couple of weeks, my husband has been talking about dropping our land line phone. It costs over $300.00 a year for basic phone service. Our home phone rarely rings. We each have our our phone and direct most calls to those phones. So why pay for a land line? For the past two weeks, we literally have been keeping track of incoming phone calls and any reason to keep the land line. This past Wednesday night brought a pretty good reason to keep our land line: in the midst of the bridge disaster, our cell phones failed. They worked here and there, but calls dropped frequently. Also, contact with our out-state relatives (who were just sure they saw my car on that bridge) was impossible for a few hours. Radio and television announcers begged people to stay off their cell phones and use their land lines instead so that emergency workers could communicate with each other.

I’ve been waited to see this story covered by local reporters, but they are too busy covering other important aspects of this disaster. The Chicago Tribune, however, featured an excellent story on the Minneapolis cell phone failure of 8-1-2007. Jon Van writes, in As Bridge Failed, So Did Phone Network:

Cell phone networks have technology that enables them to give priority to people dialing 911 and to authorized emergency personnel, but no network can handle every call when traffic spikes at levels two or three times beyond normal, said David Chamberlain, principal wireless analyst for In-Stat, a market research firm.

“The public should just expect” cell phone calls to be blocked, he said. “It’s going to happen. If I’m ever in a situation where my calls don’t go through, I’ll just send a text message. That will get through.”

Because text messages require little network capacity and travel on separate channels from voice calls, they are always the preferred mode to assure a loved one that someone near a disaster is unharmed, said Sprint’s DeVries.

While virtually all cell phones support text messaging and young people typically use it more than voice calling, it is utterly foreign to many older customers, he said.

“After the Virginia Tech tragedy, we suggested that it would be wise for parents with youngsters in college to learn to text message in case they needed to communicate in some kind of situation like that,” DeVries said.

All cell carriers said that calling volumes declined enough to support normal service within a few hours after the bridge collapse occurred. The task now is to monitor changes in calling patterns in the Twin Cities due to a major thoroughfare being closed.

Tags: Current Events, Minnesota //