London incidents

Mon Jul 11 13:20:05 UTC 2005

On 11-jul-2005, at 13:31, Michael.Dillon at btradianz.com wrote:

>> A hospital using up "emergency mode" GSM capacity doesn't make much
>> sense to me.

> This was just a guess on my part because the congestion
> in this suburban area lasted well into the evening.

Could be lots of things. Maybe it was really the hospital, but then  
simply the people in the waiting area calling all over the place. Or  
maybe some completely unrelated problem with the cell network in your  
area.

>> When it gets
>> really bad the random access channel gets clogged and all mobile-
>> intiated communication, including SMS, is dead in the water.

> I never had a problem sending or receiving SMS other than
> the long delays. The people on the other end were near
> Aldgate on the edge of central London so even there, SMS
> was still functioning.

Follow the money... At several hundreds of your favorite currency  
unit per megabyte, I'm not surprised they manage to keep this service  
running.

Here in the Netherlands we had free airtime for a few hours at the  
beginning of the new year several times, and it was interesting to  
see what this did to the networks.