Mobile carriers prepare for inauguration Video

Mobile carriers prepare for inauguration Video Transcript

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>> It's safe to say each of the millions of people here on the National mall have at least one cell phone with them. My producer and I have 6 between the two of us. Without that many devices in such a small space, the phone companies are preparing for ten to fifteen times more traffic on their network. So what is all this data and how is it gonna help you prepare for inauguration day?

>> Yeah, you bet. So you're sitting at the heart of the -- the ER for the wireless network if you will for Sprint Nextel. This is a at a glance the national level -- you know we're very color code centric, right, you know red is bad, yellow is major, green is good, right. So this is a very at a glance national view. And we're specifically in this area as an actual view from this switch out to the cell site where we can actually manipulate remotely and do some triage and restoration to the actual cell sites, right? And we can manipulate this view in any way we see fit.

>> Okay, tell me a little bit more about the concentration in the DC area for inauguration.

>> Sure. So we're at -- what you call a national control center, so we're kind of a view -- in everything we also have some folks on the ground, we have remote war locations -- what we call them war rooms where additional resources are on standby to kind of be extra eyes just to make sure that the fine tuning and preparation we've done in last week is really put as ahead of a competition and set us up for success no matter what we're presented with throughout the activity.

>> So what can users expect, reliable data, but just slower?

>> I would -- yeah, I would anticipate as the crowd gets larger you may have some -- experience some slower data speeds, yes. And with your calls you may have some delay in the call going through. You can retry your call and along with text message if you do experience delay retry your text message. Though, you know we queue those up and they will be delivered. ^M00:01:38 [ Humming ] ^M00:01:41

>> When you use your phone on Capitol Hill the call would be routed through one of these mobile cellular towers that's attached to the satellite truck that we're sitting on right now. ^M00:01:50 [ Machine humming ] ^M00:01:51

>> So this vehicle right here, this is actually a Sat COLT, it's a Satellite Cell On Light Truck and it's a mobile cell tower. So, it's on an F650 chassis, we can drive it anywhere that it needs to go, has a generator, it's fully self-contained and also satellite redundancy. So what we're able to do is we're able to bring this type of vehicle in, park it, push a couple of buttons, the tower will raise about 65 feet, the dish will turn around and then we can actually bring it on air as an actual cell site. ^M00:02:20 [ Machine humming ] ^M00:02:22

>> We brought this vehicle in for support of the inauguration because not only did it bring to the additional coverage and capacity, the additional highway lanes if you would for the cell phone traffic to drive on, but it also has a satellite dish to bring redundancy. So that allows us if the local Telco or telephone carriers go down or if there's not a T1 available we can shot to a satellite and actually bring down a satellite T1 and power this vehicle. It would still be an operational cell site if there were to be an event or something were to happen to the local infrastructure. If there was a large infrastructure outage somewhere in DC maybe at our switching operations we're able to reroute those calls throughout the switching operations. We have a war room if you would of our network personnel who will be manning it 24 by 7, so there's a lot of flexibility with these types of vehicles if there are major impacts or infrastructure impacts. ^M00:03:13 [ Music ]