Troy Rock City

Well, the big show is over.  Our small county seat managed to host reportedly around 30,000 folks, and from what I saw, almost everyone did a great job.  The drinking downtown didn't cause much trouble, and should help convince the city fathers that we can do other family-friendly events which include alcohol.

I saw almost no trouble, and what I did see was the work of security and not a concertgoer.  I was standing by the edge of the stage and watched a couple of asshole security guards start yelling at a guy at the fence, grab him and pull him over it, then drag him past me and called over a local cop I know and tell him they wanted the guy thrown out of the concert.  The cop talked to the guy a while, while his significant other was standing there crying, then sent them on their way.  I came up to the cop and asked him what actually happened, and he said the security guys were being assholes and he told the couple to just go someplace where the rent-a-cops couldn't see them.  They lost a prime spot by the stage, but, other than that, they avoided getting railroaded by the security thugs.

After the show ended, we headed downtown, and I got to have a run-in with the rent-a-cops.  We wanted to head down a side street to a local bar where my cousin was playing, but they had gates blocking it off.  The security guard was standing in the middle of the crosswalk, and as we got to the building corner, I slid the gate sideways and we walked through.  I was about fifty feet down the street when she saw us, and she yelled that under no circumstances were the bicycle gates to be moved.  I yelled back that I was sorry, but my sister and her friends laughed and said that was the most insincere apologies they had ever heard.  We laughed about it the rest of the night.

The event also highlighted an engineering issue in our telecommunications system.  For large parts of the day, the Verizon wireless network was overwhelmed.  I know that happens quite frequently at sporting events and when big events like the Boston Marathon bombing or the September 11 attacks occur.  It is a lot different than the old land line system.  Here was their design reliability standard:

While POTS provides limited features, low bandwidth, and no mobile capabilities, it provides greater reliability than other telephony systems (mobile phone, VoIP, etc.). Many telephone service providers attempt to achieve dial-tone availability more than 99.999% of the time the telephone is taken off-hook. This is an often cited benchmark in marketing and systems-engineering comparisons, called the "five nines" reliability standard. It is equivalent to having a dial-tone available for all but about five minutes each year.

 The mobile system is also designed to high reliability standards, but is easily overwhelmed:

Mobile networks have bandwidth that is more than sufficient 99% of the time. However, when disaster strikes, the decentralized nature of the network means that whole geographic regions can be knocked out by increased call volume. Whenever the generous-but-finite bandwidth at carrier site buildings are strained, users are prevented from making voice calls. Because SMS text messages take up far less bandwidth, mobile carriers instead encourage users to text message each other. As Pica put it to Fast Company, "text requires less dedicated real-time capacity than voice. Data networks including LTE and EVDO were not impacted due to the nature of the way data systems are used."

Engineers are working on improving reliability amongst large crowds and in emergencies:

 It is possible to build redundancies into America's mobile phone infrastructure which would allow the easy placement of phone calls during crises. This would, however, be massively expensive and carriers would likely pass the cost onto customers. In a 2007 Computerworld article, reporter Todd R. Weiss discovered that adding regional redundancies to mobile phone networks is not economically feasible. However, mobile providers can temporarily boost coverage in areas where they anticipate trouble such as football games and music festivals. They can even take away mobile coverage--San Francisco public transit provider BART famously had carriers block wireless signals in order to prevent demonstrators from organizing after a homeless and mentally ill man was shot by BART police....
Two engineers at AT&T, Bob Mathews and Gary Chow, have devised a method of temporarily boosting mobile phone capacity at sporting events and concerts. AT&T's multi-beam antenna uses a special setup of narrow beams spaced 20 degrees apart, mounted at special events, to boost network traffic capacity up to 500% in order to deal with large crowds. The multi-beam antenna has already been tested at the San Diego Comic-Con, Coachella, and the Super Bowl. The pair helped develop the antenna in response to what they saw as a “telecom Moore's law,” wherein data traffic consumption regularly doubled every two years.

I would anticipate that smart phones really play havoc with the system at such times.

But back to the events in Troy, I was really proud of my community, the people who worked to bring it together, and all the visitors.  Everything went extremely well.  I was amazed at how many folks I see day-to-day who were hanging out at the back of the crowd where I was.  It is good to be at home: