Verizon Now Handling an Average of 800 Million Wireless Calls a Day

Phone calls have made a comeback in the pandemic. While the nation's biggest telecommunications providers prepared for a huge shift toward more internet use from home, what they didn't expect was an even greater surge in plain old voice calls, a medium that had been going out of fashion for years. From a report: Verizon said it was now handling an average of 800 million wireless calls a day during the week, more than double the number made on Mother's Day, historically one of the busiest call days of the year. Verizon added that the length of voice calls was up 33 percent from an average day before the outbreak. AT&T said that the number of cellular calls had risen 35 percent and that Wi-Fi-based calls had nearly doubled from averages in normal times. In contrast, internet traffic is up around 20 percent to 25 percent from typical daily patterns, AT&T and Verizon said.

The rise is stunning given how voice calls have long been on the decline. Some 90 million households in the United States have ceased using landline phones since 2000, according to USTelecom. Wireless calls replaced much of that calling activity, but the volume of minutes spent on phone calls hasn't changed much over the past decade as people turned to texting and to apps like FaceTime and WhatsApp, according to wireless carriers and analysts.

Re:

[Anubis IV]

Of course, this is the same company that Slashdot two days ago reported isn't servicing Internet connections in homes during the shutdown [slashdot.org], effectively leaving those homes without a lifeline to the outside world. So the reporting (at least for this week) kinda balances out.

That said, this is also the same company that injected supercookies into their customer's connections [eff.org], allowing those customers to be tracked across the web without their awareness or consent, so I'd be fine if the reporting on them skippe

That was then, this is now.... cabin fever starts

[DeQueue]

And this is how cabin fever begins. Because now people suddenly find that they have WAY more free time than they ever wanted, but don't have an outlet to use it in the way that they want to (because almost every store or business or mall is closed) and they have, at this point, finished cleaning the garage, organizing their sock drawer and that drawer in the kitchen, and finished binge watching all the shows that they really wanted to see, so "there's nothing on" that they want to see and they have "nothin

Re:

[LifesABeach]

I was thinking of the owners of cell towers. without a doubt, their business has increased.

Re:

[jellomizer]

Well kinda. Once a week or so, I would go hang out with my friends. Or even my daily work interactions I would speak to other people.
I am an Introverted person, however, I do feel the need for some human contact.

Re:

[Randj Herdle]

We introverts are laughing. So are the people living in their parents' basements. Someday you people-persons will learn.

Re:

[myth24601]

I suspect that a lot of it is driven by the sudden surge in teleworking. A lot of people who didn't telework are suddenly having to dial into conference call lines. In my organization, most meetings use MS Teams but a lot of people have jacked up speakers or microphones so most meetings have a conference call number for the audio.

Shouldn't be a surprise really

[bblb]

Phone calls were going out of style not because people liked talking to one another any less than they used to but as a result of time management... people work more and are busier than ever so it became more efficient to multitask and send text messages for short conversations while doing other things rather than picking up the phone. Now that people are spending more time at home, soccer practices are canceled, work is being done remotely, movie theaters are shut down, etc, folks aren't forced to try and

Re:Shouldn't be a surprise really

[sarren1901]

Your post is spot on but, more to talk about...What is there to talk about? One of the worse parts of this whole crisis is that the news barely has anything to report because everyone is stuck at home. Things literally can't happen if we are all at home.

So 9 out of 10 articles are about Corona virus and you get one other random article peppered in.

Re:

[bblb]

I think the extra things to talk about aren't necessarily coming from the nightly news but the changes in daily life people are contending with; what new projects are people taking on with the extra free time, how are your kids handling distance learning, what has your office done to help you work from home, I've had these challenges adapting to having the kids around 24/7, I've watched everything on my netflix list what got any recommendations for something to keep me from going nuts... that sort of thing.

Yet there is no crash?

[jellomizer]

It seems that all this effort to curtail network traffic with ending Net Neutrality, expensive unlimited services, and throttling services. Just seemed to just be a money grab vs an actual problem?

amazing compared to 9/11

[known_coward_69]

all the landlines and cell phones were useless that day because the system was meant for only a minority of the people to use it even though everything was voice then

Bandwidth

[BManning]

So I ran some numbers. Let's assume that the average call is 5 minutes. Let's also assume that all of the calls are over a 12 hour period. That would be about 5.6 million concurrent calls. An E1 circuit can handle about 400 calls and uses about 2 Mbps. Scaling this up would result in about 28 Gbps. The FASTER undersea cable is 60 Tbps. Obviously the peak could be higher but still. Also if someone is calling someone at 5 kbps, they are not watching a video at 500 kbps. So how should be I be impresse

One good thing

[smooth wombat]

At least with people being told to say home we don't have to listen to the phone calls from those who insist on having their phone's speaker turned on while they waddle around a store.

Re:

[Rockoon]

At least with people being told to say home we don't have to listen to the phone calls from those who insist on having their phone's speaker turned on while they waddle around a store.

Whenever I think the other end has me on speaker phone, I start saying some really fucked up shit that implies that the other end is a really fucked up person. Especially if its my best friend.

We keep POTS for a real reason

[WindBourne]

back in 9/11, it was hard to make calls outside of our area. Even within parts of our area code was hard. Had to made 1-2 calls to get through. BUT, with cells phones it was near impossible and calls NEVER lasted more than 1-3 minutes. At least with POTS, once made, you were not booted.

Picturephone finally happens

[speedlaw]

I'm old, so in every "house of the future" was the AT&T Picturephone...ok at the time it was a poor black and white tiny screen, but today....everyone picture phones !!!

Due to the increase in PHONE calls

[p51d007]

We have made the painful decision to drop "unlimited" minutes and will be now offering package minutes. Signed at&t, Version, T-moble/Sprint. Remember when cellular phones came along? Minutes were VERY expensive. Then texting came along, and the price for minutes went down, but they charged per text, for SMS. Then data came along, and they gave away talking/texting but charge out the rear for data. Now, LOL maybe they will give away data and start charging by the minute for phone calls LOL.