Vodafone 3G Network Failure At Toast Martinborough

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#548346 22-Nov-2011 11:38

Geektastic: I have never been to the Melbourne Cup (although I have been to the city).

Given that somewhere like London must have hundreds of thousands of calls and data demands every minute of the day on every cell site, and rarely if ever does one hear of this sort of issue there, it shows just how much more capacity they must have in say VFUK.

A comment like that infers you've clearly never spent much time in London. Vodafone 3G is horrible there, as is the 3G coverage and capacity from other carriers.

You're also completely failing to compare cities where infrastructure is used on a daily basis, and temporary infrastructure for a one day event. If the event organisers wanted to pay a few hundred thousand dollars for permanent infrastructure, or every mobile user at the location would happily pay a surchage for the day I'm sure things could be made a lot better.

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#548354 22-Nov-2011 11:53

No.

I was comparing London with the Melbourne cup coverage referred to above, not Martinborough.

As a user, the cost to VF of providing 100% service all of the time is part of the cost of running a modern network, not an issue for me. I have expectations and their job is to fulfil them - it is how you keep customers.

I'm English and lived in London for 37 years, so I spent a reasonable amount of time there and VF always worked fine, as did Orange etc.

I think the answer must be to allow handsets to roam on all available networks in NZ - so if you cannot use VF, and XT is under capacity, you can use that and vice versa.

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#548374 22-Nov-2011 12:21

Geektastic: I think the answer must be to allow handsets to roam on all available networks in NZ - so if you cannot use VF, and XT is under capacity, you can use that and vice versa.

Please tell me you are joking?

Would this not overload the other network think about the operating frequency of handsets and everything else that has to be considered,

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#548392 22-Nov-2011 12:44

Geektastic: No.

I was comparing London with the Melbourne cup coverage referred to above, not Martinborough.

What Steve was refering to was temporary events.
These occured both in Melbourne and Martinborough.

Think of it this way.
If you are at a concert and you try to talk to the guy on stage, he cant hear you unless everyone else shuts up.
This is the same with cellphones, when there are lots in one area, they all talk over each other.

Hmmmm

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#548404 22-Nov-2011 13:05

johnr:
Geektastic: I think the answer must be to allow handsets to roam on all available networks in NZ - so if you cannot use VF, and XT is under capacity, you can use that and vice versa.

Please tell me you are joking?

Would this not overload the other network think about the operating frequency of handsets and everything else that has to be considered,

Not at all. What is the difference between allowing roaming handsets from overseas and roaming handsets here?

All I am saying is that if there are two networks or more, a phone should be able to choose which one has the most available capacity. If one is jammed solid and one is not, what is the harm in using the spare capacity? Almost any GSM phone can technically do it - it is only a question of network permission.

The long term view would be that if VF kept annoying customers who could not get coverage and all the XT users they knew (or vice versa of course) were getting coverage, that would cause the users to switch networks. Which would have the same effect.

National roaming (as I believe it is called) is perfectly possible and has been done in several places such as the USA, UK and India.

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#548410 22-Nov-2011 13:09

Geektastic: I think the answer must be to allow handsets to roam on all available networks in NZ - so if you cannot use VF, and XT is under capacity, you can use that and vice versa.

This is not the answer, this would create an even worse issue.

Within an instant the noise floor on the XT network would go thrugh the roof and that too would be unusable. The decreased noise floor on the VF network would instantly allow calls to work until every phone that couldn't connect to XT would then camp back onto VF, once again raising the noise floor and making the network unusable.

My suggestion would be to read a little on how CDMA air interfaces work, and the impact the noise floor has. As I pointed out earlier capacity is handled in a completely different way to a TDMA based network.

The concert example cisconz mentions is very much how CDMA works -

If you've got 6 people in a room having 3 person to person conversations they'll all hear each other fine. Expand that to 50 people in the room having 25 conversations and you'll start having issues hearing the other party. Eventually put 100 people in the room and you'll find you're unable to hear each other talk and can't have a conversation. This closely mirrors how CDMA works, and the issue that's occuring when the noise floor rises and phones are unable to communicate with the network.

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#548411 22-Nov-2011 13:11

sbiddle:
Geektastic: I think the answer must be to allow handsets to roam on all available networks in NZ - so if you cannot use VF, and XT is under capacity, you can use that and vice versa.

This is not the answer, this would create an even worse issue.

Within an instant the noise floor on the XT network would go thrugh the roof and that too would be unusable. The decreased noise floor on the VF network would instantly allow calls to work until every phone that couldn't connect to XT would then camp back onto VF, once again raising the noise floor and making the network unusable.

My suggestion would be to read a little on how CDMA air interfaces work, and the impact the noise floor has. As I pointed out earlier capacity is handled in a completely different way to a TDMA based network.

The concert example cisconz mentions is very much how CDMA works -

If you've got 6 people in a room having 3 person to person conversations they'll all hear each other fine. Expand that to 50 people in the room having 25 conversations and you'll start having issues hearing the other party. Eventually put 100 people in the room and you'll find you're unable to hear each other talk and can't have a conversation. This closely mirrors how CDMA works, and the issue that's occuring when the noise floor rises and phones are unable to communicate with the network.

Ah. But it DOES work and is being used elsewhere in the world...!

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#548412 22-Nov-2011 13:12

Geektastic:
National roaming (as I believe it is called) is perfectly possible and has been done in several places such as the USA, UK and India.

National roaming is completely different to enforced roaming at a specific event. National roaming already exists in NZ between Vodafone and 2degrees however access control measures are present on VF sites within 2d coverage frootprints to stop accidental roaming.

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#548414 22-Nov-2011 13:13

Geektastic: Ah. But it DOES work and is being used elsewhere in the world...!

Yesd. And elsewhere in the world the very precise description of network overloading occurs. It is not a fix for this specific problem.

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#548416 22-Nov-2011 13:15

sbiddle:
Geektastic:
National roaming (as I believe it is called) is perfectly possible and has been done in several places such as the USA, UK and India.

National roaming is completely different to enforced roaming at a specific event. National roaming already exists in NZ between Vodafone and 2degrees however access control measures are present on VF sites within 2d coverage frootprints to stop accidental roaming.

What's enforced about it?

As a customer I expect - and am paying heavily for - a service. I expect the networks to provide it, not excuses.

Toast is known about 12 months in advance. There simply is no excuse for this sort of failure in 2011. It is unacceptable to me and it should be unacceptable to VF management.

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#548430 22-Nov-2011 13:52

Geektastic:
sbiddle:
Geektastic:
National roaming (as I believe it is called) is perfectly possible and has been done in several places such as the USA, UK and India.

National roaming is completely different to enforced roaming at a specific event. National roaming already exists in NZ between Vodafone and 2degrees however access control measures are present on VF sites within 2d coverage frootprints to stop accidental roaming.

What's enforced about it?

As a customer I expect - and am paying heavily for - a service. I expect the networks to provide it, not excuses.

Toast is known about 12 months in advance. There simply is no excuse for this sort of failure in 2011. It is unacceptable to me and it should be unacceptable to VF management.

If you want to pay 10 X as much I am sure the carriers can do something,

Capacity is not something that just falls out of the sky

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#548515 22-Nov-2011 16:04

sbiddle:
Geektastic: Ah. But it DOES work and is being used elsewhere in the world...!

Yesd. And elsewhere in the world the very precise description of network overloading occurs. It is not a fix for this specific problem.

This sort of reminds me what happened at CES in Las Vegas last year. The country's largest tech conference with about 150K attendees. My friend and I had access to all three major networks with phones/3G/4G devices on AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile. None of us had Sprint phones to be sure.

The access was horrible. We could barely make calls or getting wireless data anywhere near the Las Vegas Convention centre was an exercise in futility. The conference is planned a year in advance and is annual and one would think the main carriers would try to provide additional capacity but as has been noted, it's hard to ramp up capacity to that level for a short time.

To be fair I would think the proportion of attendees having and requiring data access would be higher than that the Martinborough event but it does show that even major carriers do have issues with providing additional bandwidth. But then again Las Vegas (unlike Martinborough) is likely to have great existing coverage from all carriers to cater for the large transient populatoin.

I wonder what it's going to be like this time around as once again I plan to attend.

Staying in Wellington. Check out my AirBnB in the Wellington CBD. https://www.airbnb.co.nz/h/wellycbd PM me and mention GZ to get a 15% discount and no AirBnB charges.

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#548541 22-Nov-2011 16:53

The problem isn't so much that attendees wanting data access, it's there mere fact that modern Android phones and iPhones demand they maintain a PDP context. Add to this exceptionally poor radio software in earlier iOS releases which has resulted in a massive amount of signalling (enough to kill AT&T which it did) and you have the perfect ingredients for a problem.

It's quite amazing to compare my Android and N9. Battery life from the N9 is vastly superior due to the vastly superior radio software, and I know from a network perspective there is significantly less signalling traffic which is great for everybody involved.

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#548650 22-Nov-2011 20:51

Geektastic:
sbiddle:
Geektastic:
National roaming (as I believe it is called) is perfectly possible and has been done in several places such as the USA, UK and India.

National roaming is completely different to enforced roaming at a specific event. National roaming already exists in NZ between Vodafone and 2degrees however access control measures are present on VF sites within 2d coverage frootprints to stop accidental roaming.

What's enforced about it?

As a customer I expect - and am paying heavily for - a service. I expect the networks to provide it, not excuses.

Toast is known about 12 months in advance. There simply is no excuse for this sort of failure in 2011. It is unacceptable to me and it should be unacceptable to VF management.

Maybe you could get the LTSA to add an extra few lanes of roading over the hill,and back, just for the duration of this event. Because traffic flows weren't acceptable to some people either......
It's a similar argument.

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#548664 22-Nov-2011 22:07

oxnsox:
Geektastic:
sbiddle:
Geektastic:
National roaming (as I believe it is called) is perfectly possible and has been done in several places such as the USA, UK and India.
?

National roaming is completely different to enforced?roaming at a specific event. National roaming already exists in NZ between Vodafone and 2degrees however?access control measures are present on VF sites within 2d coverage frootprints to stop accidental roaming.

??

What's enforced about it?

As a customer I expect - and am paying heavily for - a service. I expect the networks to provide it, not excuses.

Toast is known about 12 months in advance. There simply is no excuse for this sort of failure in 2011. It is unacceptable to me and it should be unacceptable to VF management.?

Maybe you could get the LTSA to add an extra few lanes of roading over the hill,and back, just for the duration of this event. Because traffic flows weren't acceptable to some people either......
It's a similar?argument.?

I love how people always compare technology with cars and roads. In a way it is similar, however in this case didn't their notwork not work at all? That would be similar to there being a slip on the rimutukas and not being able to use the road at all, and you being stuck in the Wairarapa.

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