DG, I appreciate your insight and expertise, but it doesn’t seem to jibe with reality.

For instance, Ruben vs Clay was 24 million votes split almost perfectly in half. That doesn’t seem realistic. It seems more like the system maxed out and gave each a max of 12 million, without regard for actual votes.

Also DialIdol.com, a geek who counts busy percentages from users of DialIdol software, has shown itself to be a reasonable indicator of contestant popularity, at times even being freakishly accurate. It seems from what you describe, DialIdol shouldn’t work at all. But it does.

I believe we just witnessed Ruben vs Clay again, with Adam vs Kris. A virtual tie in the dial vote. But this time the decision was left to the text voters.

And I do know for a fact that the vote tallying and announcement resources are pooled – the guy that did a lot of the tweaking for AI used to work for me.

It is crazy how we are all discussing american idol. Some in some crazy way, the producers win again.

grrr

I say it is an iconspiracy to get tweens and teens to stop calling and start texting. A much more lucrative endeavour for Job and his peeps.

Phonecalls are totally yesteryear, KWIM?

I expect that sort of ambiguity is exactly what the Producers rely upon. :)

At the local/4E interconnect, the local network applies network management controls on the six-digit code (866-436). These are fairly coarse controls — they uniformly throttle all attempts to all numbers in the affected code. So, say, 1 in 10 calls to any 866-436 number will be processed by the originating end office or access tandem (or equivalent VoIP softswitch); the other nine in ten will get a fast busy. Sucks for anyone who runs a business with an 866-436 number, but results in uniform blocking of calls to all AI contestants. So if 10 million people attempt to vote for contestant one and 1 million attempt to vote for contestant two, the originating network will put through 1M calls for contestant 1 and 100k calls for contestant 2 (plus or minus some random variance, which at these numbers will be small).

Within the AT&T network, the engineers did a remarkable job in tuning things to get the blockage rate astonishingly low — if my memory serves, I remember numbers like 35M attempts with less than 1M blocked. Within the AT&T network, all AI calls route to the same announcement and televoting resource pool. The digits dialed are used to designate which announcement to play (“Thank you for voting for contestant 2″), but the circuits are pooled, so the probability of a given call being blocked due to a lack of announcement circuits is the same regardless of which number was dialed. Think of it as a single trunk group from the switch to a great big pooled announcement system, with enough announcements to play any announcement to any incoming trunk, rather than a separate trunk group for each announcement. Basically, if 1 in 35 calls are being blocked, 1 in 35 are being blocked for every contestant – so the contestant with 1M votes getting to the AT&T network would get 28,500 blocked and 971,500 counted, while the contestant with 100k votes getting through would get 2,850 blocked and 97,150 counted.

Bottom line, your statement that “the system does not accurately represent voters’ intention” is, well, wrong. But don’t feel bad – there were hundreds of posts arguing this on comp.dcom.telecom.tech back in the day…

They did decide to open up multiple lines for each contestant once the field narrowed, most likely for the reasons you mentioned in the post. Though this only decreases the phenomenon, not eliminates it.

The capabilities of reporting technologies and their effect on end-result statistics is an interesting concept.