Normally I wouldn't do this but given that it's of-the-moment...
fh
Better question is how well the cell systems are holding up in DC today???
But, that is slightly OT.
-Mike
Cell networks held up reasonably well for voice, though SMS and MMS
delivery times approached an hour during the event. Switch load in
almost the entire US was higher than midnight on New Years (which is
generally the highest load of the year).
Our network has been preparing since June, and I assume likewise for others.
-Jack Carrozzo
(Engineer at $large cell company whose policy doesn't allow me to specify)
Cell networks held up reasonably well for voice, though SMS and MMS
delivery times approached an hour during the event. Switch load in
almost the entire US was higher than midnight on New Years (which is
generally the highest load of the year).Our network has been preparing since June, and I assume likewise for others.
Unfortunately for me Sprint did not seem to prepare or have enough
capacity for Voice, SMS or Data access. No live Twitter blogging!
While I was able to get a few (maybe 5 between 10am and 2pm) text messages
out while standing near the Washington Monument, calls and data were an
impossibility, and SMS only seemed to have capacity available during lulls
in the Inaugural activity.
It was disappointing as a customer -- I'm sure that, had the capacity been
there, the revenue from that single event would have made a significant
impact on any of the carrier's revenue, at least for the month.
-Jack Carrozzo
(Engineer at $large cell company whose policy doesn't allow me to specify)
(Google spills the beans!) I'm curious if you can find out -- did the
record traffic positively affect revenue for that period compared to last
year at the same time, or even last week on the same day?
And from a more technical standpoint, did your $large cell company put up
temporary towers? I'm curious as to how your company added capacity to
handle the event, as well as how many "Network Busy" messages customers
got, if any. I know I got more of those messages than I did successful
communications.
Beckman
I can't comment on revenue-generation, though access as a whole was quite high.
We hardly had any voice IAs (Ineffective Attempts, or 'Busy'
messages). Since data can be queued, the only thing that would cause
data IAs are bad RF conditions - we had a TON of 'cell on wheels' in
the area for the event so we had enough carrier space to cover it.
In-network data response times were hardly affected, with switch loads
well below 50%. In-network SMS were still getting to their
destinations in under 5 seconds for the most part.... I don't have any
numbers on MMS or mobile IP data at the moment, though I would have
heard if something horrible had happened.
I'm told that the out-of-network SMS queue was piling pretty high at
one point, to delivery times up to an hour, though they all still got
there. We can't control other network's switches obviously.
This isn't trying to sound like an advertisement - *I'm* not affected
either way if people sign up with us as I'm not in sales, however from
my point of view it looks like we had the most solid network... Our
guys were planning and setting things up since June.
Cheers,
-Jack Carrozzo
How many simultaneous connections can each COW handle? What kind of backhaul
connections do they have?
-Mike
Just curious on that note with COW .. did you have much security related
problems setting up stuff nearby?
COWs are more or less full sites - so standard N concurrent voice
calls per carrier (check out the CDMA standard if you're really
interested), times the number of carriers. They can do 850+PCS all
carrier if configured that way. If we can grab fiber from a nearby
building that's best (hence why this takes so long to plan), however a
lot of time we rely on OC3 microwave backhaul. I wasn't involved with
the DC guys as I'm in Boston so I don't know specifics of this event.
Re: security, I don't know since I wasn't involved though since all
the planning started so far back I doubt there was much issue.
-Jack Carrozzo
Hi, quick question ...
Most people here said they saw most of the inauguration traffic on TCP1935 to Limelight and UDP8247 to CNN. However, we were seeing it simply as "http" traffic (i.e. port 80), which made it very difficult to manage. Our inbound bandwidth was effectively maxed out for about 6 hours.
I wonder what the discrepancy is between my experience and yours ... maybe the glass through which I am peering? We're analyzing / controlling WAN traffic with Exindas.
Thanks,
Adam
* Adam Greene:
Hi, quick question ...
Most people here said they saw most of the inauguration traffic on
TCP1935 to Limelight and UDP8247 to CNN. However, we were seeing it
simply as "http" traffic (i.e. port 80), which made it very difficult
to manage. Our inbound bandwidth was effectively maxed out for about 6
hours.
80/TCP is often used as fallback if the other methods fail to work.
Have you got any filters on your network which might cause this?
This was our case. Websense blocked all the streaming protocols and
p2p by default. It was difficult to isolate our legitimate business
traffic from the streaming content sine it was all port 80/TCP/HTTP.
Throughout the morning I was adding in streaming sites as they came
in.
We fared pretty well considering only one customer complaint and we
were able to maintain 92% utilization or internet bandwidth(one point
of saturation @ 98%).
Obama inauguration sets Web traffic record, Akamai says
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/012109-obama-inauguration-web-traffic.html
-Hank
we wonder why they have not come up w/ a better word on that IT website, a "standard" ...maybe launching day ...or opening day .....