[Ben]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7865018.stm
Clearly not enough excess capacity, IMHO.

Mobile networks also experienced a surge of traffic, with many people reporting difficulties in making calls due to network congestion. Some got "network busy" messages while checking with colleagues and family on the way to work.
Some mobile users were also reporting that text messages were taking an abnormally long time to arrive.
A spokesman from mobile network 3 said: "We've seen a very steep jump in the number of picture messages sent across the network as snowmen make an all too rare appearance in gardens across the country."
T-Mobile said it had seen a jump in network traffic too. On the morning of 2 February it saw 73% more calls than usual, 21% more texts.
Demand for broadband was also up by 20% caused by people working from home, said a spokesman.

[Hands0n]

LOL - I read that earlier in the day too. The thing is, none of these networks is designed or built to carry more than a very small percentage of the population of connections. There is a technical measure, called Erlangs, that is used in the design of telephone switch capacity.


Erlang - A dimensionless quantity used in the traffic statistical measurements in the cellular/telephone system. One erlang is equivalent to the average number of simultaneous calls. One erlang equals 3600 call-seconds per hour or 36 CCS (call century seconds) per hour.

And if you are really interested in the science behind this there is a fairly mind-numbing read (they all tend to be) just over here --> http://www.eventhelix.com/realtimemantra/congestioncontrol/resource_dimensioning_erlang_b_c.htm

Basically, as designer, you are trying to work out how many concurrent call setups and in-flight calls your network is likely to be required to carry. In doing so you will use Erlangs to help design the switch/network capacity to accommodate this load. None of this plans for peak usage, thats when "blocking" occurs which, funnily enough, is actually a designed in limitation of such tech builds. A completely non-blocking switch/network would be extremely cost prohibitive, even in today's all digital world (the analogue paradigm is carried right across into the 1s and 0s!.