Inauguration Crowd Will Test Cellphone Networks

The cellphone industry has a plea for the throngs descending on the nation’s capital for the presidential inauguration: go easy on the mobile communications.

The largest cellphone carriers, fearful that a communicative citizenry will overwhelm their networks, have taken the unusual step of asking people to limit their phone calls and to delay sending photos. The carriers are also spending millions of dollars to temporarily and substantially upgrade their networks in Washington.

Dropped calls, lost photos or delayed text messages are always a risk during spikes from sporting events and concerts. People often feel compelled to share these events with others, and that takes bandwidth.

Cellphone cameras are taking better pictures all the time, and sending those high-resolution images quickly floods the airwaves. The Obama crowd — which could exceed two million — is expected to be mostly young, just the group accustomed to staying in touch by uploading photos, blog posts and tweets on Twitter.

Many news organizations, including The New York Times, are asking people to send photos of inaugural events via e-mail.

For those coming to pay homage to the BlackBerry-toting president, the inauguration has the potential to be a wireless Woodstock. If, that is, the networks can handle it.

“If some of these estimates come true, people should anticipate delays with regards to sending text messages or making phone calls or getting onto the Internet,” said Joe Farren, spokesman for the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association, an industry trade group. It has asked people to send texts rather than make phone calls (text uses less bandwidth than speech) and to send photos only after the event.

“We can only bend the laws of physics so much,” Mr. Farren said.

To limit problems, the carriers are adding radios to the cell towers to pick up more signals and adding landlines to carry those signals from the towers to network centers. They are bringing in trucks costing hundreds of thousands of dollars that can transmit signals, some of which also have on-board generators in case of a power failure.

But some consumers and consumer advocates say the industry should not be patting itself on the back for its efforts; rather, it should be apologizing for charging consumers for a service that does not always work.

Gene Kimmelman, vice president for international affairs for the Consumers Union, the nonprofit that publishes Consumer Reports, said people in Washington may not get seamless service, but they will invariably get a bill at the end of the month.

“It’s like paying for an all-you-can-eat buffet and discovering there are only scraps left,” Mr. Kimmelman said. He suggested another way the carriers might spend their millions of dollars: “Maybe they should offer a rebate if they cut usage on Inauguration Day.”

The inauguration, he said, “is indicative of a common problem that consumers are getting charged for a quality of service that isn’t being delivered.”

Cellphone service, while spotty at times, has certainly improved in recent years. The challenges are acute at major events, which push demand past what the networks are intended to process and transmit. But many such events have predictable crowd sizes, enabling the carriers to beef up capacity.

“We know how many people can pack into a race track or concert,” said John Johnson, a spokesman forVerizon Wireless. Given the enthusiastic crowds that Barak Obama has drawn throughout his campaign, Verizon cannot easily predict the call volume on Tuesday. “It’s unprecedented,” said Mr. Johnson.

Verizon has several mobile units in its reserve known by their animalistic acronyms: COWs and COLTs (for cells on wheels and cells on light trucks).

These trucks cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. But carriers also have “sat COLTs,” which carry satellite dishes to send signals independent of terrestrial networks and power supplies.

“You drive it where it needs to go, park it, push a couple of buttons, the mast will deploy, the dish will deploy and our generator and satellite ensures we’re fully self-contained and independent,” said Tanya Lin, manager of emergency response team operations for Sprint. The company is bringing in two such trucks, in part to be prepared for any emergency that could compromise the usual infrastructure.

Sprint Nextel, which said it had been planning for the inauguration since April, has also increased capacity of its cell sites and terrestrial transmission lines to prepare the network to sustain 10 to 15 times the number of users it would serve on its networks during a normal day.

The company is increasing coverage not just in the city, but also along the route that brought the Obama and Biden families from Philadelphia to Washington on a whistle-stop train tour.