I just got back from watching the We Are One concert on the national mall, the kick-off event for the inauguration week here in DC. It is also known as inaugural concert.
The We Are One concert event was packed. I got there quite late (around 2pm) and there was no chance to get anywhere close to the reflecting pool area so I got a spot just between the WW2 memorial and the national monument. From there I was able to see the Lincoln Memorial in the distance, but could follow the show only via the jumbotrons (of which there were quite a few).
Overall the city ( with which i mean the police, metro …) did quite well, there were no major traffic issues. Well, if you had a drive with a car on a day like this you did hit some traffic, but metro was running and traffic cops did a good job getting people across those huge avenues).
One service though did not perform so well, and that was the mobile phone service, for most of the three hours I was on the mall it could not make a phone call or send a SMS message. I was able to make one call after trying more than 20 times in a row. I would assume that way more people will show up to the actual inauguration event on Tuesday, which means that it should be completely impossible to get a signal. So if you plan to meet up with some friends you might want to set a location and time in advance.
I didn’t see that many people making phone calls. It makes me wonder if all the twitter traffic was having an impact on the phone service available?
By Blackbox, used under Creative Commons.
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