Holiday overload

During the mass festivities in Pskov, there were problems with cellular communication

On the night of July 23-24 in Pskov on the embankment of the Velikaya River between the Olginsky bridge and the bridge named after. According to the city administration, about 130 thousand people gathered on the 50th anniversary of October, as well as on the adjacent streets and squares. Recall that according to official statistics, a little over 200 thousand live in Pskov. Such a crowd of people is always associated with certain problems.

In this case, serious tests fell on the share of cellular operators, whose clients could not get through to each other and send SMS messages due to significantly overloaded networks on the territory along the embankment. Similar difficulties have already arisen at the celebration of the 1100th anniversary of Pskov and the New Year.

For comments, we turned to the heads of three representative offices of mobile communication operators in the Pskov region: Beeline, MegaFon and Mobile TeleSystems, to which requests were sent.

Sergey Grigoriev, director of the Pskov branch of Vimpelcom, said that according to the reports of technical services, there were no problems with connections for Beeline GSM subscribers in the city of Pskov within the network itself on July 23 and 24. Problems with dialing began for Beeline subscribers only when they tried to contact subscribers of other operators: MegaFon and MTS.

The press service of the North-Western branch of OJSC MegaFon reported that “on the night of July 23-24 in the center of Pskov, MegaFon subscribers could indeed experience difficulties in dialing, just like subscribers of other operators. However, these difficulties were short-term and local - a temporary surge in traffic was recorded in the areas of mass celebrations, in places of the greatest concentration of people, which was served with a minimum level of failures.

The number of service requests exceeded all expectations and at some points increased by 3-4 times compared to the average. In the period from 20:00 on July 23 to 08:00 on July 24, Megafon serviced more than 188,000 calls. Overloads were observed in certain sectors of 7 base stations, in other areas of the city the network worked stably.”

“You need to understand that local problems with dialing during mass events are almost inevitable, but purely temporary. Often it’s enough just to “wait” and not try to call back every second,” the company’s press service added.

According to the company's specialists, it is possible in principle to design the network so that it can constantly withstand such extreme loads as on New Year's Day or City Day, but this would be associated with large additional costs. In this case, communication throughout the year would have to cost much more than now, since the operator, and, consequently, subscribers, would have to pay for equipment that was idle for almost the entire year, which would be fully loaded only on holidays.

The world practice is as follows - the network is designed, focusing on a typical, and not on an extreme load.

Representatives of the MTS company, which is considered the owner of the largest number of customers in the Pskov region, declined to comment.

Artem KORYUSHKIN.