American Idol: less than 10% call completion rate?

Tue May 27 10:13:30 UTC 2003

The Fox television show American Idol reported 24 million "votes"
on its final show.  According to USA Today 2.4 million votes came
from wireless text messaging, the rest from telephone calls. Verizon
reported 116 million additional call attempts, SBC 115 million additional
call attempts.  No word from Bell South or Qwest or other LECs; but
call volume was probably up in those areas too.

http://www.usatoday.com/life/television/news/2003-05-26-idol_x.htm

However, its not clear how many calls were blocked in the network and
how many were blocked by lack of resources at the destination.  When
a web site gets overloaded with a flash crowd, its usually lack of
resources at the destination.