Episode suggestion: Phone Data, Dealing with extreme demand.

[Nightness]

I'm an Uber driver and a big fan of the shows. In week 1 of the the the NFL Football season, the Sunday night game of the Bears and Packers; I was there Uber driving. The phone companies are just completely failing to providing support for large event exiting like this (80,000 people leaving the stadium, that's almost the population of the city!). Not one phone company could handle this, speeds were slow or non-existent for EVERYONE (I was talking to the passengers about this too)! The problem here is how to handle this much traffic over LTE and high speed phone data, in such a small location. I promise you the same will occur on Oct 15th's Monday night game in Green Bay, WI (every night game last year was the same as well). Try reporting the news live? I will help if I can.

[desertcomputer]

Better infrastructures but carriers need to make a profit so it either better infrastructures or profit and you know which ones they will choose. 

[LAwLz]

2 hours ago, EMC said:

Better infrastructures but carriers need to make a profit so it either better infrastructures or profit and you know which ones they will choose. 

Yeah. My city is building a municipality run free wifi and a big part of the planning is resource distribution and allocation. For example in the town square there is a very big gap between how many concurrent people are there on a regular day (maybe 50) and that are there during events (maybe 10,000). 

Do you build it to handle 10,000 people and let 99.5% of the capacity be wasted like 350 days of the year? Or do you build it to handle maybe 1000 people so that less is wasted most of the time, but it will inevitably fail during those rare events. 

 

But even with the best of the infrastructure possible, you will run into severe interference issues with so many devices talking at the same location. 

[beavo451]

For large, concentrated events, cell companies do deploy extra equipment to handle the increased demand. New stadiums are built with extra hardware in them to handle the influx of users. 

[LogicalDrm]

Its not only about availability and amount of towers. The whole thing of radio wavelengths getting more and more traffic is issue. And because some wavelengths are limited to emergency use, military and so on, there won't be change anytime soon.

[Nightness]

11 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Yeah. My city is building a municipality run free wifi and a big part of the planning is resource distribution and allocation. For example in the town square there is a very big gap between how many concurrent people are there on a regular day (maybe 50) and that are there during events (maybe 10,000). 

Do you build it to handle 10,000 people and let 99.5% of the capacity be wasted like 350 days of the year? Or do you build it to handle maybe 1000 people so that less is wasted most of the time, but it will inevitably fail during those rare events. 

 

But even with the best of the infrastructure possible, you will run into severe interference issues with so many devices talking at the same location. 

 

At these events, the only thing effected is data, voice works perfectly. Data isn't horribly slow, it actually crashes, most people get nothing.