People could take videos and photos with their phones, but network overload made it tough for them to share those images in real time.
As he took the oath of office on Friday, President Donald Trump vowed that „the forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. “
„January 20th, 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again,“ Trump told the crowd during his 16-minute speech from the Capitol Steps. „Everyone is listening to you now. “
Well, not if you were one of the people on the ground in Washington, DC, like me, trying to reach out to colleagues, family or friends on social media.
You’d think in an age of 4G communication and Twitter, it would be easy to share videos, photos and thoughts as the 70-year-old real estate mogul was sworn in as the 45th president of the United States.
Donald Trump became the 45th president of the United States on Friday. Weijia Jiang shows us the thousands who turned out to support, and to protest, Trump’s inauguration.
But on Friday morning, I watched thousands of people in front of the Capitol — all carrying phones, all taking photos and videos — trying and failing to send their words and images.
AT&T told me its customers used more than 4.5 terabytes of data during the morning’s ceremony, compared with 527 gigabytes of data for the entire day of Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2013. In comparison, AT&T customers used more than 5.2 TB of data at last year’s Super Bowl.
Verizon said its customers used about 7 terabytes of data throughout the event, double the amount of data compared to an average Friday. About 67 percent of data use was dedicated to web browsing and social media, with Facebook and Snapchat being the most used social apps for Verizon customers.
The area between the reflection pool and the stage, right where I was standing, experienced the highest traffic, a Verizon spokesperson told me. This makes sense since it was the most populated space on the Mall, and it explains why so many Verizon customers around me had so much trouble connecting to the network.
