Friday, August 03, 2007

One For; One Against

I am amazed. One reads headlines from countries around the world in which a fruit stand collapses and 35 people are killed. In Minneapolis as many as 100 vehicles rode a bridge deck down 65 feet and because of safety regulations and practices we are looking at 4 dead and 8 missing.

I know that many of us feel that the government gets too involved in the way we design and drive our cars but, damn if that ain't something.

*****
Can one of my techie readers help me? I was flabbergasted when Paula Zahn asked the good people of Minneapolis to stay off their cell phones to keep the lines open. I though that one of the benefits of cellular technology was the ability, in areas where enough towers were available, to switch cells and automatically reroute calls. Is that not the case?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Any system can be overwhelmed with enough traffic.

Heather said...

The reason they were asking people to stay off the cell phones is that there were so many people trying to call everyone they knew that the circuits jammed and no one could get through to anyone.
Figure with the number of people who work, live, and visit that area daily, how many calls were going out? Then you have people who know people up there who may have been calling to see if someone was ok regardless of the likelihood of them being in that area.

Anonymous said...

Well, yes, Heather -- we got that.

Now, for Grumps and your good question: Cell technology does have the benefit of rerouting, but that's only after the original connection. So too many were attempting to connect at the startup site, all at one time, before the rerouting step.