Out of bandwidth at the mall...

San Francisco has a relatively new, and beautiful "Westfield" mall on Market Street, and I was there grabbing a bite to eat after MacWorld, on Thursday evening last week.

While in the food court at the mall a week earlier I got a pretty good signal on my Black Berry 8700g, but I had to be in the part where the ceiling goes right to the roof, and that beautiful skylight about 200 feet in from where the entry to BART is.

But last week - ZIP ! I wandered around this whole area hitting re-dial, and got failure after failure. Then, in talking with someone that was also up for the MacWorld show, we speculated about the possible lack of bandwidth, due to maximum consumption by all the conference goers. 

While I didn't personally experience this, many conference goers were reported to complain that even the "Edge" network ( used to deliver email to PDA's ) was knocked out, so, perhaps the towers aren't tuned for the kind of consumption peaks that come with heavy conference traffic. 

But, isn't San Francisco a conference destination town?

Update - I happened to have dinner last night with one of the top cellular technologists in the country, and perhaps the world. In our conversation the phenomena of "network breathing" came up. Apparently, this is a BIG PROBLEM for non-CDMA based carriers, as the network actually expands and contracts ( hence the use of "breath" ) in a way that isn't exactly consistent with demand. So, in effect, a carrier can actually increase coverage in a particular geographic area, and then NOT completely serve demand influxes on the system as population and use in that area increases.