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An interesting thing I noticed was that all cell phones were completely useless for a pretty long time following the quake. That's normal, but one difference th
by veidr 16y ago
An interesting thing I noticed was that all cell phones were completely useless for a pretty long time following the quake. That's normal, but one difference this time, compared with several years ago, is that most people I know no longer have a landline phone at home. People were queuing up for like 20 minutes to use the one old green plastic coin-op pay phone accross the street.
At first, I didn't think to use a phone, since I was sitting at my desk and email worked normally. I could email a colleague in a different building back and forth in neartime while the quakes were happening. About 15 minutes later it occurred to me to try my (naz)iPhone and see if it was useful. It was not--could not make or receive calls, and the test text message I sent did not arrive in a timely manner (took more than 30 minutes).
Just as a data point.
- T-R 16y agoIs the cell network still down/overloaded?
- veidr 16y agoHmm wow, apparently yes. , I still cannot make a call. Press call and it goes directly to call failed. (SoftBank iPhone 4)
- lancewiggs 16y agostay with it. The telcos in New Zealand got COWS (mobile cell sites) and new cell sites/equipment down to Christchurch very quickly - importing some from China (Huawei gear I guess). Landlines take much longer to repair, and cells have redundancy - can link together with fibre or microwaves.
- rue 16y agoDon't “stay with it” continuously, though, that'll just keep the system overloaded. If you can't get through, wait 20 minutes before trying again.
- po 16y agoYes. I've heard softbank sms are starting to go through just now.
- waterlesscloud 16y agoI live in L.A. and I've kept my landline for precisely this reason.
- zeugma 16y agoIsn't that strange ? I mean cable should be more easily broken than airwaves, no ? Is it because the landlines in Japan are designed to resist and the cell phone tower got power disruption ?
- patio11 16y agoIt's because everyone in Japan started sending SMSes to everyone they knew practically before the shaking stopped and that DOSed the network. This happens fairly regularly (e.g. for a few minutes after midnight on New Years, when a large portion of Japanese people send well wishes within the same 15 second window).
- uxp 16y agoAlthough it may not have happened in this instance, cell towers are prone to fall down if shaken violently.
- ars 16y agoI suppose it could happen but prone? Especially a guyed tower should not fall down even if shaken.
- eru 16y agoFrom my experiences in Germany, SMSes send around midnight New Year did sometimes take several hours to arrive.
- 16y ago
- NZ_Matt 16y agoI experienced this after the Christchurch earthquake. Without electricity cordless phones are also useless. Our national communications company put a message out asking everyone to bring in their old corded phones so they could be sent down to Christchurch.
- nandemo 16y agoI couldn't use voice but I did use both email and web (softbank).
- megaduck 16y agoSmartphones were better than regular phones during this emergency. My android phone was useless for voice and SMS, but still had a data connection. So, my wife and I were able to send gmail back and forth to stay in touch. Also, the landline data networks seemed to be up and stable, so Skype worked great. Something to remember next time you're in an emergency and need to get a call out.
- gurtwo 16y agoI strongly suspect this is not due to an outage in the network, but rather intentional. Some years ago I worked on a project for a Japanese mobile operator to implement a system that prevents "normal" mobile phones from making calls to avoid overloading the network. When activated, only emergency services (fire fighters, police, medical, ...) are allowed to call. At regular intervals, a batch of the "civilian" phones are allowed too for a while, then a different batch, etc, so everyone gets its chance to call if they wait long enough. The system was a government requirement for events such as yesterday's quake, but I can't confirm all phone disturbances reported were/are due to it. Technically, it relies on a bitpattern called "accessClasssNBarred".