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player ready...Americans surged online in the wake of Tuesday’s attacks and the nation got a bitter lesson as the vaunted “information highway” betrayed millions who turned to their PCs searching for news about the worst national catastrophe since Pearl Harbor.
Cell phones and land lines, too, failed repeatedly as lines were overrun by users calling family members.
Essentially, modern communications technology failed Tuesday just as it was needed most.
Cellular phone companies, their networks overloaded, appealed to customers to limit all non-emergency calls and to use to land lines instead.
“Right now the networks are jammed,” said AT&T Wireless spokeswoman Danielle Perry.
Locally, Ameritech Corp. said it heightened security at facilities across its territory. A spokeswoman said the system was operating normally despite higher volume, but many callers reported finding busy circuits in Chicago’s 312 area code.
In the Washington, D.C., area, Cingular Wireless was bringing in portable “cows” or cell sites on wheels to try to alleviate the network congestion. The company reported a 400 percent increase in call attempts.
“We don’t know how many of those calls have gotten through,” said spokeswoman Michele Daro.
She asked customers to wait at least 10 seconds between unsuccessful call attempts to give time for data to clear from the handset to the cell site before trying another call. “Otherwise there’s just more congestion. [The network] gets confused,” she said.
In Chicago, as people stepped off trains during the morning rush hour, they shared news by listening on their cell phones, then turning to the oldest form of communication–word of mouth–to tell fellow commuters what they had heard.
“Everybody was on their cell phones, looking up, getting information and then passing it on as fast as they could,” said Lante Corp. executive assistant Barbara Miller. “It was eerie.”
Miller kept abreast of developments by listening to radio reports at her desk, while small knots of employees at Lante’s Fulton Street headquarters gathered around a television in a lobby.
“I went to go online at CNBC and couldn’t get through,” Miller said. ” I got some information from CNN’s site.”
One bit of good news on the high tech communications front came as many discovered that they could get through to one another and friends and loved ones by way of ordinary e-mail and instant messaging programs built in to America Online and Microsoft Internet Explorer software.
These forms of communication use far less line capacity (or bandwidth) than the news sites with their photographs and streaming video and audio feeds. E-mail thus brought relief to many whose other technologies failed.
If any lesson came through in the cyberspace chaos it was that in times of crisis Internet providers need to ration bandwidth. Bare-bones text-only Web sites like those filled by the Reuters wire service delivered far more to users than the full media offerings by CNN.com, MSNBC.com and ABC.com.
Traffic to CBS.MarketWatch.com, for example, overloaded as the site tried to deliver roughly 5,500 simultaneous video and audio streams in the hours after the blast.
A reporter, stepping out of an MRI imaging tube around 10 a.m. after a one-hour test, was greeted by medical technicians who apprised her, “A lot has happened since you went in there.”