telecom@eecs.nwu.edu (TELECOM Moderator) (09/23/89)
With the Chicago Cubs likely appearance in the baseball World Series this year, the fans are obviously eager to get tickets to the games. A few days ago, the Cubs management announced that ticket sales would be handled by Ticketron, and that phone orders would be taken commencing at 6 PM Friday night. Only several thousand tickets are available to the public, versus a million or so people in northern Illinois who would like to attend at least one game. At 6:00 PM tonight, *thousands* of calls began pouring into the Ticketron phone lines, where tickets were sold on a first-call, first-served basis to credit card holders. By 6:01 PM, Illinois Bell was so saturated with traffic the network almost stopped functioning completely. Waits of three to five minutes for dial tone were not uncommon, and call completions were almost as rare. It has to be the most frustrating thing I can think of to wait five minutes for a dial tone only to accidentally dial a wrong digit and have to hang up and (after waiting for new dial tone!) start over. The next most frustrating thing would be to finally get a dial tone, place the call and be told by the other end, 'due to heavy call volume, we are unable to complete your call at this time....please try again later.' Those of us who know a few things about the matter simply hung up the phone and went to do other things for a few minutes....but now, almost two hours later, the problem is continuing for two reasons: 1) People are still banging away trying to get through to Ticketron, although I am sure every ticket to the Cubs World Series must be gone by now. 2) The people with less knowledge of the system are still sitting by their phone, taking it off hook, waiting a minute or two and hanging up, then going off hook again and unwittingly putting themselves at the end of the queue. If they eventually decide to hang up and go watch television instead, maybe the network can normalize and become stable once again. I've had it to the eyebrows with the Cubs. I have to ride the subway at least two or three nights a week from downtown to my home, and it seems like this past summer invariably its been at the same time as one of their night games was letting out. Since they have successfully managed to screw up the CTA service on the northbound Howard line after their night games, I guess it should be no surprise that Illinois Bell will be screwed up with ticket sales calls for the next few days. In this issue of the Digest, some other commentaries about the use of special exchanges for mass calling are included. Patrick Townson
sewilco@datapg.mn.org (Scot E Wilcoxon) (09/26/89)
Minnesota had the same problems when the Twins' World Series tickets
went on sale by phone two years ago. Long-delayed dial tones all over
the state. Several cities dispatched radio-equipped vehicles around
their areas in case of emergencies. No known damage; the only death
which might have been affected by the outage was not -- someone had a
stroke, probably killing them instantly, and the panicked relative ran
three blocks to a fire department building without trying to phone.
Scot E. Wilcoxon
sewilco@DataPg.MN.ORG
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