News From the Far Side of the Planet

by Les Inconnu

There are 17 million people in Australia and between them they own one million cellular telephones.  You can see cellular phones everywhere.  Self-employed blue collar workers own them and so do couriers.  Salesmen, or anyone in business who has to be on the road owns one.  Detectives use them, rather than walkie-talkies.  Increasingly, middle-class families will own one, so that Mum and the kids can borrow it when they are away from home or school.

Pagers are almost as popular, with the same sort of people.  If a teacher in an Aussie school finds a student with a cellular phone or a pager, the teacher will be concerned that the kid's parents are over- protective; they would not think for a minute that the kid was dealing drugs.  It's a different world here.

Cellular phones and pagers are just two examples of the speed with which Australians accept new technology.  In fact only the Japanese adopt new technology faster than Australians, with Americans in fourth place (after Singapore).  But the trouble with falling in love with technology is that technology does not always return your love.  What happens with love gone wrong?  Here's an example.

Disasters and the Network

While Europe suffered floods and the USA had snowstorms, my home state and city were recently hit by the worst bushfires since 1942.

The Australian bush is triple-canopy rain forest with Eucalyptus trees and an undergrowth of scrub.  California residents will know how well Eucalyptus trees burn, and when the whole forest catches fire it is quite spectacular.

Now bushfires are an annual event but this year was something special when 229 fires linked up in a front 500 miles long.  With a 40 knot wind behind it and flames over 100 feet high, this fire moved eastward burning out an area of about two million acres.  The fire was big enough to be noticed by the world media, which normally treats the land of Oz with ignore, and here is where the interesting stuff starts.

The first story to hit the world's TV screens was that Sydney was surrounded by fire and that all roads and railways out were cut.  Now this happens almost every year and is inconvenient, but nothing to get excited about.  But 25 percent of our population are migrants, mostly from non-English speaking countries in Europe and Asia.  To their families back in the old country this news brought back recent memories of war and cities under siege, and naturally the old folk reached for their telephones and started to dial.  There are relatively few high-capacity links into Australia.  One Indian Ocean coax, one coax to Norfolk Island (and on to Hawaii) and one optical fiber to New Zealand (also on to Hawaii) as well as two satellite links.  Naturally, there is not much space allocated to these links on gateway exchanges as a normal rule.  Telephone engineers design exchanges on the basis of known statistics, but these don't cover cases like 20,000 people from the Greek islands trying to seize circuits in the Athina (Athens) gateway simultaneously.  Naturally the gateways started to experience congestion.

In the old hard-wired days a few frames at the exchange would have gone down and the problem would have solved itself.  But intelligent exchanges are designed to take care of this sort of thing.  Athina took on as much of the load as it could and passed local traffic on to other exchanges.  This caused local traffic to become congested.  Exchanges at Chaina, Ikaria, and Limassol took on extra loads, causing congestion to their local traffic.  As well traffic from Italy and Turkey experienced congestion.  Now imagine this story being repeated in a band from Britain, to Western Europe, to the Mediterranean, to the Middle East, to India, to Southern Asia, and to Eastern Asia.

Just like most U.S. cities, Sydney sprawls for about 60 miles North, South, and West of the CBD on Sydney Harbour, and bush penetrates the city along ridges and river valleys.  By contrast, European and Asian cities tend to be very compact and nature is kept at bay and under control.  When the international media announced that this suburban bush had caught fire, bringing the bushfires right into suburbia and almost to the CBD, it looked to the outside world as though the whole city was on fire.  The people back in the old country started to dial with some urgency.  If they got a busy signal, they just dialed again.  If they did get through to Australia and got no answer, then they assumed that their loved ones were evacuated, or homeless, or burnt alive (when they were probably at work, or shopping, or down the beach), so they dialed whoever they thought had information.  The result was massive congestion over local and international circuits across a large part of the world.

Well, the international media's interest in the bushfires died down long before the fires did, and with it the international networks went back to normal.  The whole episode would just be a nine day wonder, except that it had all happened before.  In 1983 equally massive bushfires swept the states of Victoria and South Australia with even bigger impacts on the international networks, due to the large numbers of people calling in from Europe and the limitations of the equipment of that period.  The Europeans made promises that they would take steps to ensure that the resulting congestion, which even impacted on U.S. domestic trunk-lines, would never happen again, but they were empty promises.

As someone once remarked, the only thing you can learn from history is that no one learns from history.