On Saturday evening, Bucharest hosted the Light Festival in the Carol Park in the center of the Capital, and on this occasion thousands over thousands of people gathered to see the show organized once a year in Bucharest. As expected, the large mass of people gathered in the same place, most of them with the desire to make their location known or to share pictures on social networks, brought the mobile phone networks "to their knees", making calling impossible for for a long time, 3G internet being just a sad memory.
Being an Orange subscriber, I noticed approximately 10-15 minutes after entering the park (around 20:30 p.m.) that phone calls were impossible, and 3G internet was just a myth in such a crowded area. The problem was similar in the Vodafone or Telekom networks, the 3G network being the one that suffered the most, the internet in the 4G network working without problems.
Together with the 3G network, the possibility of making phone calls in the 2G/EDGE network also fell, so that if you wanted to get in touch with someone, you had to have high hopes that you could make a VoIP call, or the person in question uses a social network. Given that in 2015, events of this kind are becoming more frequent and the mobile phone networks are not evolving to deal with them, what satisfaction do customers have who are caught in the middle of several thousand people when they cannot use trivial mobile phone services?
It is true that the 4G internet worked without problems, but in the impossibility of making phone calls through the 4G networks, the internet became semi-useless, especially if the people you were trying to contact did not have applications capable of making VoIP calls, or smart phones. In 2015, mobile phone operators still do not have a good enough infrastructure to support large masses of people gathered at public events and the same thing happens in the case of matches held in large capacity stadiums, not only at events organized in parks.
All three big mobile phone operators have similar problems in situations where they do not organize concerts or football matches and do not install additional relays in locations where people gather, so the blame is shared. Would it probably be too much to ask that mobile phone services work when you need them, or at least that someone invest in the 4G network so that it takes over part of the burden of the 3G one for voice calls?
Considering that problems of this kind have existed for several years, probably no one will be in a hurry to solve them too soon for Nonsense paying customers.
