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.
True but in the telco world its standard practice to provide call gapping where you effectively play ringtone at the local exchange to 1 in X calls to ensure your network isnt overloaded with 250 million simultaneous calls travelling the same path. They probably anticipated that volume and prepared accordingly.. Steve On Tue, 27 May 2003, Sean Donelan wrote:
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.
Since the final vote was so close, it does make you wonder if they were simply overloaded. This is an extreme WAG, since I have no clue how some of the circuit switched stuff worked, but if you had say 4 Million Call per hour capacity for each number, and say 20 Million call per hour attempts per number each number would basically count at the rate your equipment could count - 4 Million calls per hour per line, or 8 Million total per hour, or about 24 million in the three hours allotted. The end results would be the nearly 50/50 distribution seen in the results. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/ Read TMBG List - tmbg-list-request@tmbg.org, www.tmbg.org
participants (3)
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Leo Bicknell -
Sean Donelan -
Stephen J. Wilcox