ARKANSAS, USA — With thousands of people visiting Arkansas and using their phones during the upcoming solar eclipse, the wireless network is going to be under pressure. Phone companies say they have been working for a long time now to meet the demand.
Verizon told 5NEWS it has been working ahead of time to prepare for this, and there is not much to worry about with cell phones.
Guillermo Salinas, senior director of network performance said with so many people trying to use the network at once, it’s like the phones are waiting in line to connect. If there is not enough space on the network for those devices, slowdowns in service happen.
“The basic concept [is] you're in a queue, and then you take access to the queue,” Salinas said.
Salinas said each tower serves a certain number of devices. In the past year, they've added six additional towers to prepare for cellular traffic, so according to Salinas, that's not much of a concern for our region on April 8.
Many of the towers have been upgraded to 5G, and he said his team is constantly monitoring and adding capacity to the local wireless network.
“We've increased the capacity of the individual existing sites, so we don't have concerns due to this event,” Salinas said.
Watch 5NEWS on YouTube.
Download the 5NEWS app on your smartphone:
Stream 5NEWS 24/7 on the 5+ app: How to watch the 5+ app on your streaming device
To report a typo or grammatical error, please email KFSMDigitalTeam@tegna.com and detail which story you're referring to.