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Comment by intopieces | Hacker News Reader

Anyone who has ever tried to send a photo at Soldier Field during any large event could have predicted the crippling of the network that happened here. Maybe I missed it in the article, but did the event organizers not set up an ad-hoc network for this?

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What they should have done is made arrangements to have COWs on site from the major providers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_cell_sites#Cell_on_whee...

How do networks manage to have sufficient backbone for those mobile towers?

What good are those towers if thousand people can connect but cannot use any internet because their backbone cable is so slow. I once was at a festival in Germany where they had such measures but lacked backbones (I had full signal strength in a remote array but the internet was unusable slow).

Not every town has fiber optic to support such a surge of people.

Yeah, but it’s Chicago. A massive city, not a town.

Many of them use point to point microwave (if the provider has a good microwave network in the city).

Those are good for a couple of gbps each and can go anywhere in a city that's got line of sight.

Sears Tower (Now known as Willis Tower) is a major microwave termination point in Chicago; great LOS from most of downtown.

Your situation doesn't tell us anything about whether the congestion was the backhaul or not. IMHO, their backhaul most likely wasn't the issue. You can have 100,000 people all right next to a cell tower and while they won't have any usable service, they'll still see 5 bars.

Agreed, this should have been totally predictable based on Bears games, lolla, etc.

Niantic organized a lot of big Ingress events for the last 3 years so they _must_ have known about these problems but somehow they still managed to fuck it up.

The Ingress events have worked as long as players are distributed around a city. When everybody was in a single location (for example a shard), stuff would fail

This is a situation where a mesh network topology (like Firechat) would be necessary.

Mesh is unfortunate for these situations; the limiting factor at these scales isn't infrastructure size, but EM spectrum. The accepted solution is mandating players go onto WiFi, where you can get them to much lower emitted power by deploying enough APs, close enough to any player location, that no clients need to shout to get their traffic heard.

Sigh. Except in battlefield and deep off grid situations mesh is always a bad idea.

Or Disneyland.

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