Trump Inauguration, Women’s March Test Mobile Networks With Huge Data Demand
President Donald Trump’s inauguration and the Women’s March on Washington placed big demand on wireless networks in the capital over the weekend, carriers reported. Some reported service problems. All four big carriers upgraded network capacity in preparation for big-league service usage (see 1701050059). Public safety didn’t use the wireless emergency alerts (WEA) system during the event, but the D.C. Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency sent nine messages from Thursday to Friday to about 17,000 attendees who opted in for informational alerts, a DC HSEMA spokeswoman said.
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“The big test for the wireless networks came on Saturday, with its substantially larger crowd and enthusiastic uploading of selfies and videos,” network architect Richard Bennett emailed Monday. “Because the protest drew four times as many people as expected, it would be very surprising if there weren’t network issues. But reports of network problems on either Friday or Saturday were extremely sparse.” Verizon Wireless suffered no network outages over the weekend, a spokeswoman said. T-Mobile "didn't see anything out of the ordinary" in terms of network issues Saturday, a spokesman said. The other two major carriers didn’t comment on network problems.
Verizon Wireless customers consumed about 7 TB of data at the Friday event, double what the carrier sees on an average Friday, the spokeswoman said. Customers sent four times the typical daily data average, she said. About two-thirds of the data was spent on web browsing and social media, with Facebook and Snapchat taking the most, she said. The area between the Capitol Reflecting Pool and the inauguration stage saw the most traffic, not surprising since it was the most densely crowded space, she said. At Saturday's women's marches across the country, the wireless network handled between two and five times normal customer data usage volumes, the representative said. One city handled nine times the amount of data sent on a typical Saturday, while in another unspecified market, customers sent six times the average amount of data, with about 1 TB of data sent or received every hour, she said.
Sprint customers used 12.6 TB at the two Washington events combined, with data consumption about the same both days, a Sprint spokeswoman said. The Sprint network “moved a massive amount of data serving very dense, large crowds” at the inauguration and the Women’s March on Washington, a company spokeswoman said. “We saw unprecedented usage, far outpacing events such as the Super Bowl.” AT&T customers consumed 4.5 TB of data by early afternoon after Trump’s swearing-in and inauguration speech, the carrier reported Friday (see 1701200048). AT&T didn't comment on Saturday traffic.
Akamai said video streaming of the inauguration was the largest single live news event the company’s content delivery network ever delivered. Live video streaming peaked at 8.7 Tbps at 12:04 p.m. as Trump began his speech, with 4.6 million concurrent viewers, the web caching company said in a Friday news release. The previous record was 7.5 Tbps during Election Day evening Nov. 8, the company said. The peak for the 2009 inauguration of President Barack Obama was 1.1 Tbps, it said. “More people than ever are watching video online, and it’s being done across more devices at increasingly higher levels of quality,” said Akamai General Manager-Media Division Bill Wheaton.
Twitter users sent 12 million tweets about the inauguration Friday by late afternoon, said a Twitter Data tweet. At 12:02 p.m., users were sending 58,000 tweets per minute, it said. Saturday, there were 11.5 million tweets globally about the Women's March, Twitter Data tweeted.
The District didn’t use the WEA system, which is reserved for emergencies, though it successfully tested that portion of the federal Integrated Public Alert and Warning System on the previous Sunday (see 1701200032). But HSEMA sent five messages Thursday and four messages Friday to about 17,000 attendees who opted into alerts by texting “inaug” to 888-777, the agency spokeswoman said. Alerts to that group included the schedule of events, location of shelters, weather updates and an alert about police activity in a specific location, said a spokesman for Everbridge, which provides software and technical support to the agency.