Oahu cell phone network was overloaded after the quake

This arti­cle first appeared on my old blog at http://www.bloglines.com/blog/wsodeman?id=194

The Hon­olulu Star-Bulletin ran a good report about how the island’s cel­lu­lar phone net­works were quickly over­loaded after the earthquake.

I use Cin­gu­lar, and I found that text mes­sag­ing worked fine. That’s how I found out that the power out­age extended beyond my neighborhood.

Text mes­sages require much less data and bat­tery power than a tele­phone call. I actu­ally kept my mobile phone off dur­ing the day to con­serve bat­tery power. I’d turn it on every cou­ple of hours to check messages.

By noon, I was able to con­nect to Cingular’s GPRS (Gen­eral Packet Radio Ser­vice) net­work, so I could answer Gmail mes­sages from stu­dents and friends using http://m.gmail.com

Most of the calls on the mobile phone net­work were non-emergency calls. It’s always best to stay off the cell phone net­work dur­ing an emer­gency, unless you have a life-or-death rea­son to make a call.

VoIP (voice over Inter­net Pro­to­col) ser­vices were down for much longer than the land­line phone net­work. VoIP relies on cable modem and other Inter­net con­nec­tions, so Von­age, Road Run­ner, and other VoIP providers were unable to keep their res­i­den­tial cus­tomers connected.

I’ve never had a land­line on Oahu. I’ve only used a cell phone at home. But I was pleased that Hawai­ian Telcom’s POTS (plain old tele­phone ser­vice) net­work was up and run­ning within hours of the quake. POTS tele­phones draw elec­tri­cal power through the RJ-11 phone jack, so it was much eas­ier for Haw­Tel to main­tain land­line ser­vice with backup power. It’s ironic that HawTel’s recent radio ads high­lighted this feature.

HawTel’s down­town store sold out of corded hand­sets yes­ter­day after­noon, which brings up another point. Most cord­less hand­sets require elec­tri­cal power to oper­ate. The tele­phone line’s elec­tri­cal cur­rent is not enough.

Many Haw­Tel land­line cus­tomers found that out on Sun­day, when their cord­less base sta­tions died in the power out­age. Where’s that Princess phone when we needed it? Sure it was ugly, but it worked.

Tagged as: earthquake, electricity, Hawaii, Internet, mobile, Oahu, phone, power, reliability