Why It's Hard To Call New York
By Sarah Lai Stirland

NEW YORK, Sept. 13 (UPI) — New York City has always been a sort of "Don't Call Me, I'll Call You" culture, but in the wake of the World Trade Center tragedy Tuesday, that way of thinking was literally encoded into the telecommunications network.

It turns out that in an effort to ease congestion on its long-distance telephone network, AT&T limited the number of calls that could be made to phones in New York City, so that people within the city had a better chance of making calls themselves.

"Whenever there's a situation that generates heavy calling into an area, in this case, two areas, Washington DC and New York City, we have ways to try to limit the numbers of calls heading towards those cities. That tends to free up a little bit of capacity for people to call out. It helps to regulate the flow of traffic on the network. The important thing is that it doesn't just completely swamp all the lines so that people in the cities affected can't call out," said Dan Lawler, an AT&T spokesman.

"Whenever there's a disaster like this, it's always better to call out, because that requires less system resources than to call in," says James E. Katz, a communications professor at Rutgers University. "It's like a rivulet - it's much easier for a little drop of water to find its way down into a big stream than it is for someone to try and go upstream to navigate to go all the way back to that little node."

Katz's research shows that this strategy of giving people priority in calling out rather than being called might help them psychologically.

"Historically, when people face a grave situation, like a firing squad, the last thing people do is send a message to their loved ones - it's some small solace," he said.

But some people weren't able to make these potential last minute connections. Steve Mitra, a lawyer in mid-town Manhattan, was evacuated amidst much chaos and shouting Thursday when police alerted building authorities about a possible bomb in Grand Central train station. Mitra thought that those could have been his last moments on earth and tried to call his wife both on her cell phone and her regular line and was greeted either by a busy signal or automated "all circuits are busy" response.

Anxious and panicked friends and relatives continued to jam the phone lines Thursday in the wake of the destruction of the World Trade Center Thursday. But they were much more likely to get through on land lines Thursday than previously. AT&T and MCI Worldcom reported that traffic over their networks returned to relatively normal levels Thursday. AT&T handles about 300 million calls a day on its network nationwide, said Lawler. People communicating through Sprint's mobile PCS services had a harder time since four of the company's cell sites were damaged by the World Trade Center explosion.

For April Mason, an account manager at public relations firm Development Counsellors International in Manhattan, this meant a lot of dialing.

"I made 15 attempts to call my mom last night and when I finally got through, she said she'd tried to reach me throughout the day and couldn't get through," she said.