Story here about how mobile phones were felled by the terror blasts, with a huge upsurge in traffic. Not a great day for the mobile system.
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It looks like Reuters are somewhat overloaded too… 😉
When I go to that link all I get is;
“General Error
We are experiencing technical difficulties at this time. Our apologies for the inconvenience. (9-0) “
I will try and get another link. Thanks for pointing that out.
The link seems to work now, now being 9.40 pm.
I received a call from a mobile phone at about midday today, but when I rang back immediately after putting the phone down, no dice.
I must have had some fantastic luck, then: I found it nigh on impossible to ring mobiles from my mobile, but it wasn’t too difficult to get through to landlines or to call home (America) to check in with my father. And I had constant, uninterrupted GPRS service to my phone (new iMate JAM), which meant that I could use its web browser to log on to Gmail to reply to frantic messages from friends.
All in all, not as bad as I would have expected. (But then I also managed to find a black cab and get home for under a tenner, which is another minor miracle. Lots of those today, methinks.)
I am not sure if Brian is referring to the call he received from me. I was outside cemtral London at that time (I was in Millwall heading south from Canary Wharf) so things may have been worse in the centre of London.
I found that with persistence I could generall get through to people today. It sometimes required me to redial the same number a few times, but eventually I got through. (This was worse if I was trying to call a mobile, but I still got through eventually).
The network still seemed congested this evening. Even an hour ago it took me three attempts to make a call.
I have an unsubstantiated story from a good source that the mobile networks were asked to configure the network to refuse calls in central London, possibly due to the risk of remote detonation.
Or, they may have gone into priority working where mere mortals are denied access. Such a facility certainly existed on fixed line service as part of the system X design.
I have also heard it suggested that the network was shut down to prevent mobiles being used to trigger further bombs, but since it worked for some people that seems unlikely. Most major incident plans I think assume that the mobile network will be restricted to allow priority to emergency services, whose communication needs of course increase enormously at times like this. I believe a major problem at Lockerbie was the capacity of the communications network.
I’ve now managed to read the story and it looks as if the enmergency provisions were not activated.
I know a lot of people in my company were of the opinion it was a government shutdown, as many have worked on the software that runs mobile networks. But just because they could have done it didn’t mean they did. I guess if everyone in London (or even in the outskirts like I am!) had one or two people phone them at once the network would quickly go down.
I think GPRS works a different way to voice so as long as there wasn’t loads of other GPRS users you should have been able to get *some* connection?
I had my mobile and landline out for a while this morning. BT were playing a message to try again later whenever I tried to dial. I heard on Radio4 that the mobile networks had been shut down to prevent potential bomb detonations by mobile. Internet was working perfectly though.
My impression (from London) was that the networks were simply congested, not closed down. I received calls from the USA on both landline and mobile, though I gather it required several attempts to get through, as did the outgoing calls I tried to make.
On 9/11 they certainly were disabled – of that I’ve no doubt.
One element I’ve not heard remarked on is that you can’t trigger a device on the London underground with a call from a mobile phone – for the most part, mobiles don’t work there. You either have to use a timer, or a suicide bomber.
Almost certainly congestion with this one. It doesn’t take much to push the City into poor network mode. I often find a nice Friday afternoon will push O2 to its limits just with people talking about pubs to go to.
This morning must have been hell. I had trouble actually phoning friends to check, but SMS seemed to work ok.
Normally lurk, but thought I’d comment, since this is a story I’ve been following today: and I’ve had it officially confirmed from inside that there was some invocation of ACCOLC in particular areas of London in the immediate aftermath of the attacks.
But as far as I’m aware it was just to free priority calls; this wouldn’t have been to stop cellular detonation.
As of now (midnight) the network’s still struggling in central London, even though the nets are saying they’re doing OK. While government may have affected it earlier in the day, that sounds more like straight forward overload.
Odd, at 11.00pm Peter Powers, formerly of the Anti Terrorist Squad, was on Newsnight stating that switching off the cellular networks was one of the first things that was done when they realised that there was a bombing campaign underway.
My handset (o2) went off air at 09:46 this morning and didn’t reactivate until around 5:30 this afternoon. This wasn’t “no coverage” which you would get from either a limited or choked service network, it was “Service Not Available”. Other people I have spoken to today got the same messages from o2, Orange and T-Mobile – don’t know about Vodafone, 3 or Virgin.
Julian Taylor writes:
“Other people I have spoken to today got the same messages from o2, Orange and T-Mobile – don’t know about Vodafone, 3 or Virgin.”
That is curious. I was receiving and sending calls and text messages on 02 before then.
Oh God, I hope that doesn’t mean I’m on a list 😉
GCooper the bombs at Moorgate (within 100 yards of the station) and at Edgware Road (right at the junction of the Circle/Wimbledon lines and the Hammersmith & City line and involving 3 trains) were on a “sub-surface” line – not an actual tunnel but more of a deep cut below ground level. I agree that a lot of the time it is not worth using a mobile on those lines but you could dial the number and leave it ringing until you heard the ‘bang’, so to speak – the Edgware Road bomb would have been in open air at the point of detonation. As for the Russell Square bomb that would have had to be either a timed device, as you stated, or an Al Queda volunteer who I do hope is right now discovering that the 72 promised virgins actually means 72 Raisins. Imagine his surprise when Allah says, “here’s your packet of Californian Raisins, now piss off down to the hot place”
Julian Taylor
From what happened with me I can only agree. I’m on Vodafone, which went ‘dead’ at about the same time as your service did: Things freed up at about 4pm and I was accused afterwards by some of turning my phone off all day.
Even if there was an overload, I remember clearly that BBC Radio, at lunchtime, reported that all mobile networks has been shut down to prevent more detonations via mobiles.
I’m no techie and don’t even know if such a thing is possible. In any case, I remember thinking that if the reason stated is true then I could live with with it for the day. However, that libertarian spark flared and I also felt uncomfortable that the state may be able, technically, to order such a thing. This was all in response to a clear and unequivocal statement on BBC Radio that the mobile networks were shut down deliberately.
Julian Taylor: I don’t pretend to have much better than a hapless user’s understanding of where and how the tube runs, but wasn’t the 8.56 Russell Square-Kings Cross tube at one of the deeper points of the system?
Either way, the point I was making was that you would be a particularly lame breed of terrorist to rely on mobiles for a mission like this.
Then again…
No publick telephone system, cell or land line, is designed to handle anywhere near the maximum potential number of users. It’s designed to cope with normal peak averages. A cellphone is nothing to rely on in a general emergency.
It is not a big mystery. As Mark says, the mobile sytems are not over-engineered (they’ve grown up under competitive conditions, after all) and do not have vast redundant capacity. There is a priority switching system for the emergency services which was in use yesterday, so the combination of reserved bandwidth and higher traffic caused a lot of patchy unavailability.
What they said on Newsnight was that they can shut down the whole network to just about all mobiles, with the exception of those handsets fitted with a special ‘priority’ chip, presumably police, fire etc
There’s nothing quite as sinister as that. The Operators can relatively easily stop blocks of SIM card ID numbers from registering with a base station and therefore effectively keep them off the main network, or they can block them to only 999 calls.
Certain phone IDs can be exampted, kind of like what can happen if you don’t pay your bill.
Julian’s right: this wasn’t just blocking SIMs of unwanted users, there’s a specific system of registration for “high level” users (I think there are around 15 security levels in the system). I don’t think police actually count, though, since they use the Airwave system that is outside the normal mobile network.
But as far as I’m aware, ACCOLC wasn’t invoked to stop detonation: firstly some of the attacks were at deep line stations, secondly I think they were just freeing the networks for priority callers.