This Time, Cell Phones Woes
Failures in outage reveal weaknesses
edit: (CDMA to the rescue!)
By Richard J. Dalton Jr.
Staff Writer - Newsday
August 23, 2003, 9:51 PM EDT
When the lights went out, Donald Buckland trudged for more than five hours from his job on the Upper West Side to his mother-in-law's house in Flushing. Trying again and again to call his wife with his cell phone, the perseverance finally paid off when he crossed the 59th Street Bridge into Queens.
The hours after the blackout earlier this month proved frustrating for Buckland and many others who tried to reach family and friends using a cell phone. Less than two years after the cellular network faltered following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the cellular system -- which the wireless industry promotes as a safety net during emergencies -- choked again.
The system broke down as a flood of nervous callers overloaded the network for some carriers; there wasn't enough capacity to handle the excess calls. Complicating matters, many cellular sites, which depend on electricity, had inadequate backup power.
Cell-phone carriers say the electrical outage was an event they couldn't possibly foresee.
"This was a massive, unprecedented, once-in-a-lifetime failure of the electrical power system," said Mark Siegel, spokesman for AT&T Wireless.
"Calling volumes went up pretty significantly for us," he said. "And then, of course, the power is gone."
Industry executives question whether it's worth investing substantial capital into the system to prevent service problems during a major power failure that happens maybe once every 30 years.
"It's like blaming the microwave oven manufacturer that the microwave doesn't work when the power goes out," said Roger Entner, an analyst with the Yankee Group, a consulting company in Boston.
This view rankles consumer advocates who say crises are precisely the time when cell phones are most important. Now that consumers have come to depend upon cellular service, the industry should either educate consumers more about its shortcomings or expand the network, advocates say.
No federal regulations exist regarding reliability.
"There should be a reliability test that these guys should pass," said Bruce Kushnick, chairman of TeleTruth, a telecommunications consumer advocacy organization based in Manhattan.
During its investigation next month into the blackout itself, Congress will likely look into the problems cell-phone customers faced.
"Any system that depends on electricity or computers is going to have real problems during a blackout," said Ken Johnson, a spokesman for the House Energy and Commerce Committee. "Our bigger concern is: Why aren't the backup systems more reliable? Undoubtedly, it's a question that will be raised."
Emergencies are one of the top attractions for buying a cell phone. About six in 10 people who lack a cell phone say they would feel safer or more secure owning one, according to a recent poll by Harris Interactive for AT&T Wireless.
The $76-billion industry even fosters the notion of the cell phones coming to the rescue during emergencies, touting that wireless phones handle 139,000 emergency 911 calls every day.
But shortly after the power went out Aug. 14, some callers saw an indication that service wasn't available, meaning nearby cell sites were out of power.
Other customers received a faster-than-usual busy signal after dialing, indicating the cellular network was overloaded. Still other customers could place calls, but the recipient's phone wasn't working, so the caller would hear either nothing or incessant ringing.
Many of the calls were rejected as the overburdened system couldn't handle more calls. It's like having so much traffic on the Long Island Expressway that people have to wait to get on an entrance ramp.
The inadequacies of cell phones emanate in part from the technology itself. Cellular networks are a combination of two major inventions: the telephone and the radio. A cellular phone sends a radio signal to a nearby cell site, which then relays the call to a switching station that routes it to the recipient on a landline or wireless phone.
It's a decentralized network, with cell sites throughout a coverage area that can cover a radius of up to 10 miles, and each cell site dependent on the local electrical system.
The traditional landline phone network, on the other hand, is centralized, with hard-wired connections to each home and business. The power comes directly from the local office over the phone lines, and the backup power is only required at the local office.
That century-old setup held up quite well. But the 20-year-old cellular network that Americans have come to depend upon choked for worried customers.
Even barring an emergency, the cell-phone network is inherently less reliable than the landline network. The industry standard: For every 100,000 cellular calls, 2,000 fail to connect, compared with one failure for landline phones.
But the reliability during emergencies was worse, according to Consumer Reports magazine, which found that 15 percent of cell-phone users faced trouble reaching 911, with 4 percent failing altogether.
Experts say it's more difficult for cellular phone companies to predict capacity than it is for landline phones. After all, the local phone company knows the maximum number of calls it might handle because there's a hard-wired connection to each home and business with phone service. With cellular phones, people can travel anywhere.
Cell-phone carriers try to predict how many users will be placing calls in a given area and place an appropriate number of cell sites to handle the volume. But in an emergency, the volume skyrockets. In the hours after the power went out, wireless carriers in the New York City area were hit with up to four times the number of calls.
"One of the first things people think of during an emergency is to make a cellular call," said Alan Reiter, president of Wireless Internet & Mobile Computing, a consulting company in Chevy Chase, Md. "One reason people can't get on a cellular network is because there are too many other people on the cellular network."
Cell phone companies build their network to handle the amount of calls they project for the following year. But the growth of the industry has been phenomenal. The number of cell-phone subscribers skyrocketed to 140 million last year, double the number from 1998, according to the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association.
Cellular calling is more popular than any of its most imaginative inventors envisioned when they unveiled the first cellular phone in 1973 with a pricetag of $3,500 and weight of more than two pounds. (It took another decade for commercial service to become available.)
Capacity wasn't the only issue in the blackout. Many of the problems were caused by insufficient backup power. The core of the cellular network -- the switching stations that route the calls -- had generators with enough fuel for several days, and can run indefinitely with refueling. And most cellular sites have backup batteries.
The problem was that batteries generally can power the site for just two to eight hours, depending on how many batteries the location can accommodate.
In urban areas, cellular towers aren't feasible, and carriers must squeeze in antennas wherever possible, including stairwells and the sides of buildings. These smaller locations might only be able to handle a couple of backup batteries. Bigger sites, on floors and rooftops specially reinforced to handle the extra weight, might accommodate a dozen to 20 batteries.
Still, cell sites eventually ran out of backup power. Nearby sites with backup power could pick up the traffic by expanding the radius they cover. But those sites would have to transmit the signal further, draining the batteries faster.
When the batteries die, a backup diesel generator kicks in -- if one has been installed. But even companies that sell generators say they're not feasible at many sites because local ordinances restrict the use of diesel fuel in certain locations, and some landlords resist bulky, noisy, smoke-producing devices on the roof.
At sites without backup generators, emergency response teams for the cellular carriers rushed around the city, Long Island and other affected areas with portable generators, which could recharge the batteries in a few hours.
And when all else fails, COWS come to the rescue -- that is, Cells On Wheels. COWS are portable cellular stations, which can actually transmit the calls to the wireless phones and send them through the network via a cable connection or a microwave signal.
Verizon Wireless has used COWS during concerts and other events as well as emergencies, such as the crash of TWA Flight 800, the Sept. 11 attacks and the blackout.
Over the long term, cellular providers are adding coverage to more areas and overlapping coverage areas. Last year, cellular companies spent about $22 billion on capital investment, or $160 per subscriber, according to the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association. And several carriers have deployed technology that allows a given site to handle more calls by transmitting the signals more efficiently, and others are upgrading to the more efficient service.
But industry representatives questioned whether the cellular phone companies should pump significant money into the network merely to ensure full use during such an unusual event as a widespread blackout.
Buckland, who trekked from the city to Queens, benefited from having an alternative. The next morning, when he was unable to reach his wife, he turned to his portable Ham radio, reaching a Whitesone man who had phone service. "I said, 'Would you mind telling my wife I'm OK and could she pick me up?'"
Soon Buckland was on his way home to Kings Park, discovering once again that an old technology was more dependable than his fancy cell phone.
"That happens all the time," he said. "That's why I carry that radio with me."
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