When Mother Nature strikes, getting decent cell phone coverage can be a challenge.
Even following last week's earthquake, many soon noticed that cell phone service was spotty or, in many cases, nonexistent. For some New Yorkers, it was a communication blackout reminiscent of 9/11.
In both cases, mobile phone users were unable to connect to the cell network to communicate with loved ones.
Why is this the case?
Well, on 9/11 cell phone outage was the result of many factors...including the downing of cell phone towers. Whereas, during the earthquake situation, the problems were caused purely by volume.
Regardless, it has left many questionning the reliability of mobile phones in the face of other serious emergencies...like hurricanes.
Here are some of the reasons it happens...
1. There is a finite capacity that the cell phone system can support at any given base station. If it is 10 users or 100 users talking on their phones...when the 101st user calls in, there is no channel available for that user to occurpy.
2. Cell phones are coming up now on the 4th generation of technology. Since this time, most of the work in between evolutions has been aimed at getting higher data rates because people now also use their phones for accessing the Internet and for exchanging videos and pictures. There have been improvements in capacity, but not enough to keep up with just a tsunami of traffic across the wireless networks.
3. Finally, cell networks and Wi-Fi both have limitations. Cell phone networks have a lot less bandwidth than Wi-Fi. But at least cell phone service providers own the part of the spectrum over which their customers communicate. This enables the cell providers to guarantee a certain quality of service. But as far as adding capacity...there isn't a lot of spectrum available for them to purchase. (source: accuweather, scientific american)
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