And what will you do in the mean time? It’s not like they have millions of pay phones poised and waiting for deployment. It would take weeks or more like months to get they out in significant numbers. And if you need a phone right now?
I think people in this thread are under rating the disruption if the cell system went down permanently (which is what we are talking about here I assume). No more cell phones ever. It wouldn’t be ‘Paradise’ for most people, since they have become reliant and in most cases dependent on them. We don’t even have office phones anymore, just cell phones where our VoIP system simply forwards calls to our individual ‘office’ numbers to our cell phones. All our on call engineers and tech get the help desk number forwarded to them in turn depending on who’s week it is so, no help desk calls until we re-organized our entire phone system and bought VoIP handsets for everyone (and, if the cell system is down, that probably has other implications for other technologies as well since I can’t imagine just one system going down and not touching anything else).
It would be a major disruption at the least, and there would be a significant number of panicked and frightened folks out there. And it would be coast to coast and around the world. And the US probably wouldn’t even be hit the hardest, since there are many other countries that are even more reliant on cell phones than we are.
People in this thread seem to think that cell phones are ‘only’ for social interaction (as if this makes light of such a disaster in any case, somehow), but business heavily relies on them these days as well. I don’t think the impact can be overstated…it COULD cause, at least in the short term, a major economic down turn, and even disrupt critical emergency systems, since there are a non-zero number of radio systems that use cellular/3G/4G networks to relay signals from base stations using IP (we use part of our microwave system to transport radio signals back to a dispatch center).
Think of everyone who has or uses a cell phone in their daily life for communications and consider what it means that they won’t be able to use that communication anymore. It’s going to do more than disrupt some teen agers tweeting each other, or updating their Facebook page or sending another lame mobile update and video to YouTube…
(And depending on what caused the mobile phones to all go tits up might ALSO have impacted that Internet thingy…which would have more of a disruptive effect than simply annoying those WoW players from going on a raid…)
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I’m glad to see that at least one person has considered the possible problems.
I asked the question because I really wanted to get a better idea of what the problems might be together with people’s perceptions of those problems.
The question is not even completely hypothetical.
It has been posited that as we enter an era of much higher than usual solar activity the increase in the solar winds might cause considerable problems for mobile communications. (And, indeed, several other important systems.)
Whilst it’s often the case that there are no, or very few, actual problems associated with theoretical possibilities (e.g. year 2000 bug) it does seem to be something worth bearing in mind.
Having said that, I must admit that my initial assumption was that there would be very considerable problems for a few days but that these would fairly quickly over the course of a few weeks and in well under a year we would be pretty much back to the state we were in before mobiles took off.