The Earth Moved & the Phones Were Still

When the earthquake happened, I was in Philadelphia by a lot of government buildings, including the Department of Homeland Security, so it may be the carriers have an excuse. But the network went down for a long time and stayed down.  Although the carrier spokespeople have stated that the demand overwhelmed the network but service was shortly restored, it was a different experience for those of us who used up a few hours trying to reunite with loved ones and check on people’s statuses.

Strangely enough the social networks were probably a better place to communicate than the PSTN. Getting through on the network was hard. After the San Francisco BART decision, I questioned exactly how much of my problem was demand and how much was reserve for official use. My network operator had this interesting strategy of pushing the fast busy dial tone in my ear even when I was connected to a party I was looking to reach. Not sure if this was a feature or a failure in design?

I have asked some very hard questions to the carrier spokespeople and as of this hour, I have gotten little response. 

• Did the recently demoed Emergency Broadcast SMS system in NYC get utilized where it was available?
• Since no one has LTE voice calls yet, what was the experience of 4G users vs. your other customers on the voice and data side?
• On POTS we had the Mother’s Day circuits, what is the maximum capacity for call completion on wireless networks?

On a reporting basis, the voice call discussion will sound good. “We were overwhelmed by demand for about 20 minutes,” is the spokesperson line. However, for me locally it took longer for the phone networks and yet at the same time I kept receiving email. I sent my wife an email, she sent me text, I sent text but the texts were out of sync and somewhat delayed.

According to Charles Landry, Senior Vice President of Messaging for Syniverse here are the stats for their experience with SMS.

• Syniverse processed over 220 million SMS messages in the two hours following the earthquake, as compared to 192 million messages for the same two-hour period yesterday, representing a 15 percent increase.
• When looking at traffic peaks during the same two-hour period, there was a peak increase in SMS traffic of 13 percent from the same period a week ago and a 21 percent increase from the same period yesterday.

I am looking for some stats from the Skype and the social network crew but so far nothing.

Not to bring up a touchy subject but 10 years ago when NYC had a significant crisis we found the Internet more reliable than the PSTN, Again when Hurricane Katrina struck we saw VoIP available when the wireless networks were not.

As we talk about the twilight of the PSTN, the question of reliability is still a concern. The FCC’s answer is to rely on the large carriers. However, you have to question the sense of ceding and control to the people who the Internet was designed to supplement in a crisis. The internetworking of IP is to enable multiple alternate paths. 

I regret that I did not have the presence of mind to look for WiFi. My sense is I probably could have gotten through. There is a lot more that could be done with emergency services and to be fair to NENA and the carriers they are implementing some good solutions.

However, had this been an actual emergency, I am not sure the SMS broadcast advising people to remain calm or the words of reset and regret from spokespeople on Twitter would have been sufficient comfort.

Ten years ago, I was running a SIP event when NYC was attacked. I look at how far SIP has come and I think we have made progress, I look at the way it’s regulated and I see that we have a long way to go. We have better technology than regulation. If you are with us in Austin September 15^th, The SIP Tutorial will be going on at the same time as Regulatory 2.0. 

Like the Internet we can say it will be Tools over Rules. 

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