Re: American Idol: less than 10% call completion rate?

["Stephen J. Wilcox" <steve () telecomplete co uk>]

True but in the telco world its standard practice to provide call gapping where 
you effectively play ringtone at the local exchange to 1 in X calls to ensure 
your network isnt overloaded with 250 million simultaneous calls travelling the 
same path.

They probably anticipated that volume and prepared accordingly..

Steve

On Tue, 27 May 2003, Sean Donelan wrote:

> The Fox television show American Idol reported 24 million "votes"
> on its final show.  According to USA Today 2.4 million votes came
> from wireless text messaging, the rest from telephone calls. Verizon
> reported 116 million additional call attempts, SBC 115 million additional
> call attempts.  No word from Bell South or Qwest or other LECs; but
> call volume was probably up in those areas too.
>
> http://www.usatoday.com/life/television/news/2003-05-26-idol_x.htm
>
> However, its not clear how many calls were blocked in the network and
> how many were blocked by lack of resources at the destination.  When
> a web site gets overloaded with a flash crowd, its usually lack of
> resources at the destination.