Tuesday, July 29, 2008

In case of emergency, please try again later

This morning we had a moderate earthquake in the LA area. It was strong enough that we felt it 150 miles away in Santa Barbara, but not so strong as to make us feel like we were in danger.

After this minor event, it was almost impossible to make a cell phone call into or out of Santa Barbara for the next 3 or so hours. I understand that it's not economical for the phone companies to build enough towers and bandwidth so that every person on their network can make a phone call at the same time. However, it is a bit troubling that even after a minor earthquake such as this that we're not able to use our phones. What will we do if something serious occurs?

1 comment:

Becky said...

Did we have cell phone problems during the fires? That was a situation that was more immediately threatening, but I guess there wasn't a concentrated burst of frantic phoning.

Still, we were 150 miles from the epicenter! Why were our towers overloaded?