Bridges fall and cell phones die

I GOT HOME a little after 6pm, traffic was brutal due to road construction all over the main stretch of road I take to get anywhere, I35W in Minneapolis, MN. I got off early and took back roads to avoid the congestion of the Mississippi River bridge, it was down to two lanes from eight, they have been resurfacing it for a month or so now.

I got home and made a few phone calls. The usually quite reliable T-Mobile network I am on was giving me fits and starts, network busy signals, odd error messages when trying to call my girlfriend(1) for dinner, and generally unsociable network behaviour. I didn't think anything more of it until I started getting SMSes asking me if I was all right.

Several SMSes later, I was informed of this, the largest bridge near my house, about 5 blocks away, fell into the Mississippi river. It used to be Interstate 35W, now it is a naval navigation hazard.

So, vendor plugs in mind, I hopped on the WebEx Segway, armed with a crusty old Pentax Optio 4Si and the insanely great Nokia N95 for an adventure. It was insanely dull, crowded with people, more firetrucks and police cars, and in general, crowds with the collective intelligence of koi.

The first odd thing was the smell, it was dusty in places when the wind was right, but never smelled offensive. There was a tanker truck burning and billowing black smoke from the far side of the bridge, but again, nothing you could get close enough to to be annoying.

After the first initial angle or seven, and coming to the conclusion that the people calling for more infrastructure investment were right, I started to think about the question of why this happened. This is a tech site, though, and the bridge situation has some eerie parallels to the bit slinging world.

While I was out, I got a dozen or so SMSes but only one or two calls. Every tenth call I tried to make went through, and half of the successful ones had problems like not hearing the other end, dropping, or unusable quality.

Why? Simple, overload. The infrastructure could not handle it. Friends as far away as 10-15 miles could not place calls, the entire network was teetering on going down. My T-Mobile account, my girlfriend's Verizon and Keith Bachman's Cingular phones all went into the drink. Err, bad pun, had suboptimal operating characteristics. We were far from alone.

I am told people on the TV and radio were imploring gawkers to stay off their cell phones so emergency services could use theirs. When the people doing the important work are shut down so you can do a play by play for aunt Millie, something is seriously wrong.

The communications infrastructure did not fail like it has in the past, but for emergency responders, it was not what I would call reliable. If you were sitting on a rock in the Mississippi River with a few broken bones, would you want the ambulance driver to be getting a call or a message that the person they are calling is not taking calls at this time? Can you hear me now?

In the end, we had an over reliance on technology, and it came back to bite us. This time it was not bad, as of the time this is being written, there were seven confirmed fatalities, a tragic loss, but not many in the grand scheme of disasters. Had it been a city wide catastrophe instead of a point problem, I don't think the trickle of cell service would have even been there.

Once again, we face many of the same problems the US Government so failed to help us out with over Katrina, the ability to cope with the corner cases. Infrastructure used to be built to tolerances and usage levels that would never be seen, much less commonly seen.

Now, it is built to a level where people are not going to be annoyed enough to seek redress. The problem? Corner cases go from problematic to disasterous and people end up dead when they should end up mildly inconvenienced. I can think of two or three times when the cell network has collapsed locally, and that is two or three too many.

Now the convenience of cell phones is moving into public safety, and so are the tolerance levels. Your safety is suffering, and you are at risk, all for a few dollars. It may be hard to justify spending the cash while times are good, but when your house is burning, getting through to emergency services is probably worth it.

What did today prove to me? First, the cell network is barely adequate for public use, and completely inadequate for mission critical use. We are not spending enough on infrastructure and overcapacity, and things are reaching critical levels of neglect. When this happens, your phone goes flaky, bridges fall, and people die. µ

(1) She, on the other hand, was trying to reach her mother because she had heard the news. She tried dialing 15 times or more. Each call dropped after 5-12 seconds of airtime. Nothing rang through. She hates her Verizon Chocolate phone and was starting to wonder if the phone had finally entered it's last death throes. -She