The first blast in New Delhi is reported to be taken place around 6.15 pm at Karol Bagh’s Gaffar market. Within few minutes two blasts rocked Connaught Place while another one went off in Greater Kailash. As news spread about the blasts the first thing which came to most of the minds is to call and enquire about the well being of near and dear ones.

But then came the dampener which only made most people anxious and uneasy. The mobile network was jammed within no minutes and all attempts to make or receive calls turned futile.

In such situation it is natural for subscribers to curse their respective service providers.

But a more realistic fact reveals that the service providers are almost helpless in such cases. It is a known fact that any telecom exchange or network is designed on the basis of Erlang traffic.

Erlang refers to the peak hour traffic. It is the maximum traffic recorded on the network during the 24 hours of a day. Telecom exchanges and networks are designed after thorough and careful study of determining Erlang traffic.

Erlang is a prime reference point since it is practically and more importantly financially unviable to have network equal to the total subscriber base. It will lead to unused network resources for most of the time and thereby result in unutilised resources. Moreover in Indian scenario, spectrum is scare, so it can not be used leisurely. It is for all these reasons that Erlang assumes importance in network design.

Now in cases like today’s bomb blasts, almost all the subscribers try to connect a call thereby overshooting the Erlang limit. This effectively results in network getting congested.

Under such situations observers advice that one should use text messaging or SMS to communicate with loved ones. Text based services consume less space on telecom network as compared to voice based services. Also the time duration in text messaging is negligible as compared to a voice call.

So kindly use SMS in such scenarios and do not blame your operators since such scenarios are beyond their control.