In the thread “Pick Your Armageddon” (a hypothetical: “How would you bring the US to its knees” type of thread), several people have suggested taking out the cellular phone system. (Assume, for the purpose of this thread that it’s taken out on a permanent basis.)
Would this really make all that much difference?
Mankind managed to get on perfectly well without mobile phones until about fifteen years ago. If they were suddenly unavailable would it really be all that hard for people to go back to the state of not being contactable and able to contact others 100% of the time?
I dare say there are certain people who have arranged certain aspects of their lives in such a way that they would have to reorganise things in the absence of mobiles - the same with some business/work operations but I can’t believe it would even begin to bring a country to its knees.
Surely, people would just deploy various work-rounds and, within a few weeks everyone would be living their lives pretty much as usual.
A completely different scenario to what would happen if all the worlds computers suddenly stopped working. :eek:
The world worked fine without mobiles and would work just as fine again. Do people imagine that work and socialising had been impossible in the history of human civilisation until their wide-spread adoption?
However, if you kill cell phones in the middle of a disaster, then it’ll increase the personal panic level. It’s sort of a bonus. When I mentioned it, it was with memories of the great blackout of '03. The cell phones went down with everything else. Some people weren’t expecting that, so I figured it was worth mentioning again.
I’m sure that any sudden removal of the service would cause significant disruption - even with nothing else going on and would certainly make any other problems considerably worse.
I recall that on 9/11 cell phone service took a hit in NYC. For obvious reasons, the system was overloaded and some people were unable to call their family for hours. Which I’m sure did increase the panic level of those families, but even so, 9/11 isn’t referred to as ‘The great cell outage of 2001’.
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…)
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.
It would really depend on how extensive the outages were, and where they were concentrated…and if the system went down in phases or went down all at once. Also, how quickly service was restored, and how it was restored/where it was restored first.
If the entire system went down all at once, it would be a disaster. How BIG a disaster is probably debatable (heh), but I’d say it would be fairly major, since whatever could take down the cell network would also probably impact heavily on other communications systems as well. Also, if it went down in a single area (say, the New York metro area, since someone mentioned 9/11), that would be purely a local problem, while if it went down in an entire region that would be much worse. World Wide and it would be VERY bad indeed.
So, the answer is it would depend on the severity and extent of the outage, as well as the duration. If it went down permanently, and world wide? Man…time to start stock piling food and ammo, at least in the short term. It would take years to recover and re-convert everything back to land lines (if we would have that long), would probably cost hundred of billions or even trillions of dollars (including the loss of equipment, services, revenue, etc), and if you toss in the internet as well? Time to rediscover the joys of hunting and gathering…
Why would anyone be panicked or frightened by the loss of cell phones? Inconvenienced, yes, certainly. Whole businesses would find themselves running memos by hand, and several would have to close their doors for a week while somebody hunted down a land line with which to call the suddenly-overworked phone company to turn the phone service back on. But why would there be panic?
Remember, the presumption is that nothing else dies. Arguably this includes wireless cards. This means that (nearly) everyone can still get on the internet and see that the world is still turning.
My first response was lighthearted, but in all seriousness farmers have become rather dependent on cellphones and cellphone technology. After all, when you’re out in the middle of a field and your tractor breaks down it’s not like there’s a pay phone nearby.