Heavy Data Use Puts a Strain on AT&T Service

Hmmm, this may actually may be the good side of the iPhone. :-)

It could force an earlier demise of TDMA and the adoption of CDMA (and the elimination of the GSM TDMA-induced interference :-)

For a general not-too-technical distinction between CDMA and TDMA:

and

It's coming. The next generation of GSM, known as LTE, uses CDMA. You should start seeing it in a year or two, which is quite fast by telco standards.

Even better, all of the major US carriers plan to use LTE so we may return to the good olde days when you could use any phone on any network.

R's, John

Many people must carry two cellphones, one for personal use, and one from their employer. Cellphones should be like keysets, able to handle multiple lines, a hold button, and push-to-talk intercom. (Only problem is where to fit the six buttons on today's tiny phones. Heck, the designation strip alone occupies more square inches than the phone has.)

So history repeats itself...back in the early days of computer time sharing the phone companies complained because the holding times on data calls were so much longer than was typical for voice calls. This required additional trunks and switches in the central offices to maintain service quality.

Yep, commercial data - and about 10 years ago Dial-up Internet connections

- really bent the old Erlang calculations way out of shape.

Who still recalls the "Internet Gridlock" hysteria about 10-15 years ago and how the whole voice network was going to collapse because of long modem calls......

Which just reminded me of "something odd" that occurred back in the 1960s and early 1970s here in Silicon Valley. Many of us at Tymshare would do what is now known as telecommute. Turns out one programmer lived in Los Gatos and we couldn't figure out why he'd lose the data connection every

2 hours like clockwork. He ended up setting a timer to 1 hour 55 minutes, log off, reset the timer, then call back and log in, ad infinitum.

Long story short, Los Gatos was served by GTE (the rest of Silicon Valley was Pac Bell) and GTE thought a 2-hour call was an indication of equipment failure, so they'd drop the call at the CO.

I don't recall exactly how that problem was resolved because many of us would be off hook and on-line for 8-12 (or more) hours a day developing software.

One time I was out in the wilds of Iowa, and there was something printed in the phone book (small independent company) to the effect that calls were limited in duration and would be automatically disconnected after so many minutes.

I can't see a timed drop call at 2 hours because it thought there was a problem. Most GTE switches were 53 or 53A at that time. There were also a few 72's. I have worked on them and have never seen that. Some switches had electronic front ends, but that could only happen if they dropped, maybe it was something in the PacBell trunk.

That's possible. The 2-hour drop was a fact (I saw it occur after being invited there to see what might be the problem) and it could have been PacBell "doing a number" (no pun :-) on calls from the GTE service area.

In 1979 I was a summer student doing programming. We would spent hours on the phone telling customers exactly what to punch character by character as we made changes via voice. If there were too many changes then we'd courier the 8" floppy. We would regularly hit this

2 hour limitation when talking from Winnipeg to Thunder Bay.

Now that I think about it Thunder Bay was/is it's own telco. Most of our other customers were in Manitoba so that may account for the difference.

(Side note: When I mentioned to my mother that I might have to make a business trip to Thurnder Bay she said, in a dreamy sort of voice, "You were conceived in Thunder Bay.". Dad was a drywaller then and they spent the first year they were married there.)

Tony