American Idol: less than 10% call completion rate?

The Fox television show American Idol reported 24 million "votes" on its final show. According to USA Today 2.4 million votes came from wireless text messaging, the rest from telephone calls. Verizon reported 116 million additional call attempts, SBC 115 million additional call attempts. No word from Bell South or Qwest or other LECs; but call volume was probably up in those areas too. http://www.usatoday.com/life/television/news/2003-05-26-idol_x.htm However, its not clear how many calls were blocked in the network and how many were blocked by lack of resources at the destination. When a web site gets overloaded with a flash crowd, its usually lack of resources at the destination.