On jammed frequencies

If you live in Kingston, ON and have a Bell or TELUS GSM phone, chances are you're experiencing some technical difficulties: dropped calls, failed calls, delayed text messages... I know I am.

I called in a technical ticket and should have an answer by Tuesday. Meanwhile, the problem hasn't been resolved. In fact, it may have gotten worse.

Every time I try to make a call, whether local or long distance, it fails. It'll fail five or six times before going through, and then, though I haven't moved, the call will drop after a couple of minutes of airtime. It's very tough to have a decent conversation, which is super frustrating. In fact, it totally sucks.

The TELUS rep at the store downtown was much more helpful than the 611 technicians in explaining the nature of the problem to me. It seems that these issues arise yearly, which is something the phone techs are not necessarily aware off. When all the Queens students come back to town, the population of Kingston, ON doubles. To make matters worse, the new influx of cell signals is concentrated to the downtown core. This causes the cell towers to be completely overloaded, especially because GSM signals* aren't as strong as the old CDMA and other non-SIM card technologies. To make matters worse, TELUS hasn't put up its own towers in Kingston yet, so all non-Rogers 3G customers are dependant on the proper functioning of the shared Bell towers. Clearly, they do not have the capacity to provide proper service to all those who want it, and I will be asking for a partial refund on my service.

At least the @TELUSSupport rep on Twitter was helpful in letting us know that they were experiencing text message delays on the HSPA network. At least this means the text messages are actually going through and coming in - unlike yesterday - just not in a timely fashion.

If you're in the same situation as I am, don't despair! Apparently, the network traffic overload will be lessened in a week or so and in the next couple of days, everything should be back to normal. Hopefully.

* Please excuse any terminological errors... This isn't my field of expertise!

On Blogging

I would just like to point out that in the last week, I've had 2 spikes in traffic to the blog.

The first was when my comment about NISTAR was picked up by a community blog.
The second was when I linked to my blog in comments on HabsInsideOut.com.

For me, an average traffic day is somewhere around 9 to 12 people. A good day, ie, when I update my blog, hovers around the high teens.

When my ISTAR blog got picked up, I had nearly 30 unique visits for 2 days straight.

When I posted on HIO, my traffic spiked to over 350 unique visits, approximately, for a few days, with a high of 696 loads on Sunday.

WOW.

I had no idea the sheer amount of people that read HIO, including the comments, and actually post comments, follow links, and interact with the website in other ways. Incredible. The people who actually clicked on my link represent only a small fraction of HIO's daily traffic, of that I am sure.

So on one hand, I wonder why HIO doesn't get more interactive - a facebook group, automatic twitter feed, etc - and also why it doesn't have more fan-generated content on the site. Also, I'd like to point out that the picture gallery is really tough to navigate fluidly.

On the other hand, I really have to thank everyone who visited my blog, especially those who commented on my posts, whether here, on facebook, or through other means. It really means a lot to me. In fact, it's given me the drive to post more... Even if I don't have much to say.

Once again, thank you!!!

And stay tuned...