Boston Officials Did Not Shut Down Cell Network After Marathon Bombing

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Motherboard about the immediate aftermath of yesterday's bomb attack in Boston, which attempts to explain the (unsurprisingly) poor accessibility of the cellular network after the blasts: "Gut instinct suggests that the network must've been overloaded with people trying to find loved ones. At first, the Associated Press said it was a concerted effort to prevent any remote detonators from being used, citing a law enforcement official. After some disputed that report, the AP reversed its report, citing officials from Verizon and Sprint who said they'd never had a request to shut down the network, and who blamed slowdowns on heavy load. (Motherboard's Derek Mead was able to send text messages to both his sister and her boyfriend, who were very near the finish line, shortly after the bombing, which suggests that networks were never totally shut down. Still, shutting down cell phone networks to prevent remote detonation wouldn't be without precedent: It is a common tactic in Pakistan, where bombings happen with regularity.)"

Overloaded

[Anonymous Coward]

After the Earthquake in Virginia in 2011, you couldn't make a cell call to save your life, since several million people picked up their phones within a few minutes of each other. Text messages went through fine within a half a minute or so. Something similar happens whenever an unexpected event of note happens anywhere.

Re:That doesn't mean it wasnt jammed

[MightyYar]

I was able to text back and forth with my niece, who was at the race. No idea what network she is on, though the interwebs say it is an AT&T number. I don't think things were being actively jammed.

That is the best use of text messaging

[damn_registrars]

I almost never use text messaging, but it is extremely useful when cell networks are overloaded as it uses almost no bandwidth and hence messages almost always get through. Unfortunately not many people think of it that way and tend to keep trying to make a voice call when the network is rejecting their attempts.

Re:That doesn't mean it wasnt jammed

[Lumpy]

AT&T networks crumble when there is only 10,000 people in a small area like that. WE have a small motorcycle rally here in July and the 8000 to 10,000 people will utterly crush the nearest 3 cell sites for the entire weekend for AT&T. Verizon does better, but data is completely useless.

Dated information

[Brucelet]

I don't know for sure on cell service, but there's a whole lot of other outdated information in that article. Specifically, the fire at the jfk library is now known to be unrelated, and law enforcement officials have stated that no undetonated devices were found.

Re:That is the best use of text messaging

[afidel]

SMS actually take zero bandwidth on GSM networks, they use the ping packets that the phone must exchange with the tower every so often to send the message, it would otherwise be padded with zero's. That's why the message length on SMS is so short, it's limited by the difference between the header needed for a ping and the size of a timeslice. Some phones will opt to use the data network if available to ensure faster delivery but SMS was really a brilliant hack to take advantage of the nature of the network.

Use SMS in emergencies

[mrops]

In such emergencies, its better to use SMS than place a voice call.

SMS rides on control signal and as long as your cell phone has a signal, it will get queued and delivered.

Voice calls require acquiring of a dedicated voice channel, these are limited and overloaded in such emergencies.

Re:it should be common knowledge

[cdwiegand]

They weren't activated, and the ones that were in use during the race (for coordination) were all evacuated and followed those orders (http://cqnewsroom.blogspot.com/2013/04/boston-marathon-update-all-hams.html)

You're more likely to find hams helping in inter-departmental capacity, where large-scale (this was so not large scale) events require coordination between multiple police and fire departments, hospitals, etc. This was a local situation where Boston Police (and to a point DHS) were involved, but no other agencies - they can usually handle talking on their own radios to themselves.