World - SMS best way to communicate during a crisis

The serial bomb blasts that rocked Delhi on Saturday collapsed the mobile networks across the city, with users calling their families and friends to enquire about their well-being.While consumers complained that the cellular networks jam when they actually need to make emergency calls, operators say that nothing much can be done to tackle such peaks in usage that lasts for a few hours after any major incident. But what makes our communications services so vulnerable? According to technology experts, there are at least four different situations when the operators, the Government or technology cannot do much to keep you connected. The biggest and most common cause is when the telecom network gets congested in a crisis situation, just like it happened on Saturday in Delhi after the serial bomb blast. Customers in other cities like Ahmedabad and Bangalore also had to deal with a congested network after bomb blasts rocked these cities recently. Higher load While most telecom networks have the capacity to function even if there is a 200 per cent increase from the normal day peak hour traffic, in times of severe crisis, operators record a 500 per cent increase in traffic. “In such a situation, when the load is higher than the capacity of the network, the system collapses just like it would in the case of electricity-generating units. However, some of the operators have designed their network in such a way that the system does not collapse but the excess traffic gets rejected, which gives a busy tone in case a subscriber calls into the network,” said a leading telecom technology vendor. The phenomenon is not common to India only. Telecom networks in London and New York were jammed after the bomb blasts in the sub-way train last year and the twin-tower tragedy respectively. Operators say that a similar surge in traffic is witnessed during New Year’s Eve or a festive season but since these are expected events, they get enough time to upgrade their networks. “Events like bomb blasts or other natural calamities are unpredictable and it is too expensive a proposition for us to keep excess capacity in anticipation of such a crisis. However, we do deploy technology that can increase the capacity of voice calls up to 200 per cent and three times more short messages,” said a Delhi-based operator. Short messaging Operators said that a way to get around the problem would be to keep the calls short and communicate more using SMS in times of crisis. “Short messaging takes less capacity than voice calls because in the latter, we have to provide a channel dedicated to the call whereas in messaging, the text can be sent by the network as and when capacity is available,” said a Mumbai-based operator.