Originally Posted by
rondog
After reading the thread about "minimum posts" and the foolishness in that thread, I just thought I'd mention something a lot of people may not realize about cell phones. Cell phones are essentially radio receivers/transmitters. They only work when in range of a cell tower and cell site. Most folks know this.
What most folks DON'T know or realize is that cell sites DON'T have unlimited capacity. The number of calls that the equipment in a cell site can handle at one time is limited, the equipment CAN get full and not be able to process your calls, even if you're right in front of the site.
I worked on a huge project in Dallas/Ft. Worth to upgrade the Metrocell network, and the new equipment we were putting in each site was only a T1 circuit in bandwidth. That's only 24 calls that each site could handle at one time. This was around 1995, and at that time I was stunned that the technology was so piss-poor. My background is in fiber optics and I'm used to HUGE amounts of traffic capacity. My world deals in terabits per second of bandwith.
I'm sure that modern cellular technology has improved to where cell sites can handle far larger amounts of traffic, but my point is that they have a limit as to how many calls they can handle at one time. Since the two parties in that argument were both trying to call each other and not getting through, it's entirely possible that the cell site their calls were trying to go through was maxed out at that time. Think about how many damn cell phones there are out there now, and how much people use them.
I'm not taking any sides in that issue, just wanted to point out that cell phones aren't perfect. I actually hate the damn things, I think they're a curse. But I usually need to use mine when there's no signal available. Give me a land line anytime.
