Break Down in Communications
Posted in Uncategorized on November 27th, 2006The break down of communication systems have already started.
Today I called my brother on my cell phone to his cell phone. I’m on the Verison network and he is on Cingular. He answers the phone. I can hear him but he cannot hear me. I hang up and call back. Verison tells me that the number i have reached is part of the Verison network and that it has been disconnected. I call back a third time and get though.
Switchboards cannot handle the traffic when a radio station gives a prize away. All circuits are busy? What are you really paying for? The ability to only call when the average number of people on phones is below what the switch can handle is todays norm. Why do you say that?
We live in a world that cuts corners. Phone company has 200,000 lines installed. Over the past 20 years the average people using those lines have been slowly decreasing. 20 years ago the phone switch could have handled 100,000 lines all being active. 10 years ago they installed a new phone switch that would only handle 150,000 lines being active at once. This saved the company a lot of green ($$). Why only 150,000? Well, they figured that only a max of 150,000 would ever be on the phone at once. The numbers had declined and really on about average about 100,000 were on at a time and they gave themselves some cushion. Now there switch can handle about 75,000 and still have a cushion. Not much of one mind you, but enough.
Is this smart business? To the company it is, even more so to a phone company. If they wanted to, a switch with only 50 lines could be installed for the 200,000 consumers. Not nice of the phone company, but what are you going to do when there is the only player in town. That is just some of the economics behind what will happen one day.
One day you will try and use your phone to make a call to 911 and you will not have a line that will connect you. It will not ring busy, it will just tell you that you have to wait your turn to use the line so hang up and try again.
The next thing to go will be the phone switch. It was over loaded and over worked and in service for way longer than it should have been. Then all the systems are down. No calls.
If the phone company had taken just a little more time and spent a little more money then more people would have phones and they would not be down right now hurting there consumers even more.
Data is the same way. I don’t think that we, as a world, have the technology that it takes to make the internet, servers, and other things run as fast as we want them. A company somewhere will cut a corner, and then another company. Soon you have several companies all saving what they can to save a dollar.
Your data will miss route. If you are a company that doesn’t cut corners then you have to deal with ones that do. Think of it this way. You have 8 cups and 4 strings. You can talk in any cup and one of the cups on the other end will hear you. Break a line and talk into the cups again. Now one of the cups will not send your voice, data, and/or signal down the line to the other cup. The string represents a company that is helping to hold something together. The company’s delivery is now sub par. You may not know it because 3 of your cups heard the request and processed it. You did good by having a backup. You may not know you have a problem until you send something down the line with the broken string. You are now suffering because a company cut a corner.
It works this way all over the US. We will cut corners until we cut our foot off, and maybe past that, just so we can save a dollar now. Who cares what the price is later? The company doesn’t so much mind paying a little more to fix it right the 2nd or 3rd time. It was able to get by cheap enough, get you to pay for the upgrades and then some.
So what if it all came down at one time. What if the set of switches came down. Data and called to parts of the world would stop. Denver could call Atlanta and Atlanta could call Tampa but Tampa couldn’t call Denver and Atlanta couldn’t call Denver. What do you do when it is broken. You have broke the trust of the people. It only takes once.
I personally don’t think that it will last much longer, unless businesses wise up. Put a little extra money into their investment of what they do. Something has to give sometime. The question is when.
One more thing. Verison is not the cause of the problem with my phone. I have heard others are starting to do it as well. I think that it has come about form software and hardware upgrades. The ability for someone to take their house number and transfer it to a cell phone and have that much routing going on, something is bound to get messed up. It may be to far gone now it may not. It was not fixed at the time of this writing that is for sure. Also one of these days I will learn to speak proper grammar.
Tags: Verison, Cingular, phone switch, data, company, economy, cutting corners, communications
