Using a specially adapted railway car and two colossal cameras, he photographed everything from the mahogany interiors of luxury cars to freight yards, tunnels, and switch towers.
The goal, Mr. Walentas said, was to provide westward views for as many units as possible, since a hulking Verizon switching tower looms to the east.
And in late August, a cable fire that damaged a critical switching tower near Jamaica Station disrupted service for a week, forcing commuters to rearrange their schedules to cope with cancellations.
It has its own navigation app, plus a clever partnership with mobile carriers that lets it use data about when phones switch from tower to tower to calculate traffic.
A call on a cellphone in a moving vehicle switches towers to maintain communication.
When it's set, if the iPhone notices you've left an area (which it can tell by your phone switching cell towers), it will update your location on the Loopt map that is built in to the software.
But no one party is to be blamed, says Amresh Nandan, research director, communication service providers at Gartner India, who says call drops are on account of a multitude of factors involving the government, consumers, telcos and the regulator - like spectrum, network capacity, geographical coverage, capacity utilization, switching between towers and even technical failures.
The pilot of that flight — US Airways 3329 with 73 people on board — had just been ordered by the Warrenton controllers to switch to the tower controller's frequency for final approach.
