Walkie-Talkie App Gets 6 Million New Users Due to Hurricane Irma

Zello has become the de facto choice for real-time updates on Irma: the walkie-talkie app, which enables people to communicate on public channels on the app using Wi-Fi or cellular data, allows users to not only field audio questions but upload screenshots with updates or pertinent information as numbers to call if someone runs out of gas on the road. While the app supposedly uses a lot of battery power, it has already aided numerous rescue attempts.

“We’ve seen an explosion in a crisis before so that’s not so surprising,” Morris told Recode. “The main group in Harvey is called the Cajun Navy. They used Zello in prior years and they had great success a year ago during what was then the biggest flood since Katrina. So when they came to Houston they strongly urged the community to use Zello and one of the reasons is because Zello works when most other things don’t.” As people start losing their power all over the state, the channel is serving as an important source of information that Florida residents may have typically received in the past by watching local TV reports.

Hope the company has a good infrastructure for their servers. Some apps have toppled in the past when they get a surge of new users.

But you need cell towers to actually use this app? So if cell towers get overloaded or lose power then it's useless.

sfsuphysics said:

But you need cell towers to actually use this app? So if cell towers get overloaded or lose power then it's useless.

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Exactly.

What 9/11 showed was that the typical land line or VOIP doesn't work very well during catastrophic events when everyone is trying to use it at the same time. But sms/txt worked great because of small packets being sent.

I thought voxer was a more popular app and developed first... Could be wrong... It's well used in the military.

There's a few people that have been complete assholes in those channels. One of the hosts told one of the people being assholes that they could either stop or the person's IP (which is logged?) would be taken, identified, and forwarded to the state attorney's office (wherever the origin is from) for prosecution. Damn.

the-one1 said:

What 9/11 showed was that the typical land line or VOIP doesn't work very well during catastrophic events when everyone is trying to use it at the same time. But sms/txt worked great because of small packets being sent.

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That was a long time ago. Call bandwidth is tiny compared to people snapchatting photos of their house getting desstroyed.

Jehuty said:

There's a few people that have been complete assholes in those channels. One of the hosts told one of the people being assholes that they could either stop or the person's IP (which is logged?) would be taken, identified, and forwarded to the state attorney's office (wherever the origin is from) for prosecution. Damn.

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I was curious so I downloaded this app and joined some of the channels about Hurricane Irma. A lot of trolls in channels where people are coordinating rescue efforts.

The internet: see the best and worst of humanity at the same time.

the-one1 said:

What 9/11 showed was that the typical land line or VOIP doesn't work very well during catastrophic events when everyone is trying to use it at the same time. But sms/txt worked great because of small packets being sent.

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More than that, SMS is just using spare space in the signaling layer, so if that's working, you can typically get a text out. That said, there was a guy on periscope, throughout the storm, on Marco Island, which was hit pretty harder than anyplace other than the Keys (in the USA. Obviously the islands got worse). And that was on Sprint. But if people evacuate, and the towers are up, data should work, since there isn't a lot of traffic in an evacuated area.

That said, if you're contacting someone local, I'd think a walkie talkie would accomplish the same thing. If I ever decide to ride out a major hurricane, I'm getting one of those

So nextel walkie was way ahead of it's time.

Verge said:

That was a long time ago. Call bandwidth is tiny compared to people snapchatting photos of their house getting desstroyed.

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When I was in Oregon for the solar eclipse I was staying with someone who works for ODoT (dept. of transportation), and he said they were so expecting people to absolutely fucking destroy the cell bandwidth by having loads of people live streaming to facebook or whatever that they passed out CB radios to everyone

Verge said:

That was a long time ago. Call bandwidth is tiny compared to people snapchatting photos of their house getting desstroyed.

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It's not the bandwidth, but number of connections. If you think of the topology of a PBX, it's basically like a switch with dedicated paths for each connection. You could have 1,000 phones connected to an exchange, but there might only be 100 lines going out of the exchange. So where you run into the issue is that all of the paths between two exchanges get clogged up because under normal usage there might be a 5% uptake (50 simultaneous connections), but when an event occurs you might be trying to force 150 connections onto a system only setup to handle 100. These days everything is software based, so I'm sure all of that stuff can scale to the available bandwidth. Back around the turn of the century you're talking about most place being connected with T1 lines which is 24 simultaneous voice calls before the line is filled up.