Wireless World: Still a few bugs in the system

A weekly series by United Press International examining emerging wireless telecommunications technologies.

CHICAGO, June 18 (UPI) -- Last week, during the preparations for the funeral of former President Ronald Reagan, panic proliferated on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.

An airplane, transporting a politician to the funeral, departed from authorized airspace and seemed to be flying toward the Capitol dome. Immediately, fretful authorities evacuated the legislative complex, for fear of a terrorist suicide bombing.

Worried building occupants flooded out into the surrounding area and tried to reach loved ones on their mobile phones -- but soon no one could dial onto the network, increasing their frustration and anxiety.

"That is a textbook example of a network planners' nightmare," Derek Kerton, founder and principal consultant at the Kerton Group, a telecom consultancy, told United Press International, in a telephone interview from Singapore. "The network was not equipped to meet the sudden demand."

Whether it is a national funeral for a former president, or a natural disaster, or a man-made disaster, such as the attacks on the World Trade Center or the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, mobile phone networks never seem to cope well with sudden spikes in demand.

Simply put, the networks -- including base stations and switches -- were not designed that way.

"Freeways and expressways get all tied up when there's too much traffic, and so do mobile phone networks," Bill Johnson, a professor in the telecommunications program at Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, N.Y., told UPI.

On average, the networks boast around 99.999 percent efficiency -- almost perfect service.

"That means a given network will lose about 1 minute of time in a typical year," Strohmeyer said. "That's 'five nines' of quality!"

That all depends on how you define "quality". How many times have you made a cell call or received a cell call where you couldn't understand the person at the other end? You wouldn't define that as quality, would you? I suspect that quality in this case is defined as a successful link, i.e. the cell phone(s) in a call were successfully linked together. Whether you could actually carry on an intelligible call after that is inconsequential. It's kinda like saying that your browser can link to www.freerepublic.com but the data transfer after that is corrupted to the point that you can't read anything after that. In the eyes of the cell phone industry, that's still 5-9's quality.

You're probably right. . .but how else could they define quality? Any thoughts?

Sure. Look at POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service)--your regular land-line phone. Do you have the quality problems on a land-line phone that you do on a cell phone? It's not nearly as bad, is it? That's because that phone system has set quality standards that they adhere to--maximum noise levels, guaranteed bandwidth, etc. You could argue that the wireless phone system is a different medium--radio frequency communications vs. a copper wire medium--but what about radio and TV? They're wireless and they've got pretty good quality AND they make money at it.

The reason cell phone service is so bad is mentioned in the article: the cell service providers are trying to maximize channels within a given frequency spectrum. That's fine, but that doesn't mean that the signal they are passing through has to be noisy and distorted. If you wanted to measure the quality of that signal then just pump a data signal through the channel (through a modem or something similar) and measure how many packets are dropped, the bit error rate, etc., just like everyone else does.

Another reason cell service is so bad is because people are simply willing to tolerate it. It's a new technology and, hence, fascinating. Once the shine wears off people are going to start demanding better service and/or providers are going to start providing better service as a competitive advantage.

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