What if all the mobile phones just stopped working

Great Debates
21

[QUOTE=begbert2]
Why would anyone be panicked or frightened by the loss of cell phones?
[/QUOTE]

Because just about everyone uses and relies on cell phones. Do you need a doctor? How do you get a hold of him or her if they don’t happen to be in the hospital? How do you get a hold of emergency services personnel if they aren’t at work (or even if they are and simply aren’t in their office)? It would be a huge panic, especially after the realization that all the services were down.

Ok, so, let’s say this happens tomorrow. And let’s pretend that something like this could happen in a vacuum and not impact any other communication technology…just cellular systems.

So, what would the effect be? Tomorrow, everyone who relies on a cell phone or a pager will be out of communications. Any emergency that comes up, there will be no way to tell the response people that there is an emergency. For instance, if there is a large fire tomorrow, dispatch won’t be able to call or page off duty emergency response personnel. Volunteer fire and police won’t be able to be contacted. Doctors who are on call won’t be. Brokers won’t be in contact, and customers won’t be able to reach sales reps.

It would be, in short, pandemonium…at least in the short term. Oh, eventually things will sort out (assuming that ONLY cell service is effected). But it would take time just to figure out what was happening and then more time to figure out old school work arounds. And in the mean time, people would most certainly panic. Hell, people panic today when cell service is just disrupted in a single area…let alone a complete downing of the system and not just locally, or even regionally, but globally.

The only wireless that would work (presuming that it’s ONLY the cell networks effected) would be those that are directly tied to an internet provider with ground lines. Anything using 3G or 4G data networks would surly be effected by the same disruption as the voice. Stuff like pagers use that system.

In the US that’s pretty much true (though if you use a remote device like a Blackberry, iPhone or iPad using 3G it wouldn’t be), but a lot of other countries rely heavily on their cellular data networks for internet. Japan for instance relies much more on cellular networks for internet than on land lines going into individual houses. There are several European countries that have similar setups, and a couple places in Africa that rely almost exclusively on this technology.
I think it would be much worse than a lot of folks in this thread seem to think it will be. To me it’s similar to the rather caviler way some businesses look at their networks or internet access today…almost as if it’s just a luxury or not vital. They simply don’t realize how dependent on the technology they have become, and what effects it will have on their business if suddenly the thing breaks. Granted, I’m not a disaster assessment expert, and I don’t KNOW the actual effects of a complete downturn in cell service, but I can tell you that those folks who think that losing their network or their internet wouldn’t be a big deal? They are absolutely wrong…and that’s from personal experience. Knowing how much I rely on my cell phone, and how much my office does, I can tell you that it would be bad…really, really bad.

-XT

22

Because just about everyone uses and relies on cell phones. Do you need a doctor? How do you get a hold of him or her if they don’t happen to be in the hospital? How do you get a hold of emergency services personnel if they aren’t at work (or even if they are and simply aren’t in their office)? It would be a huge panic, especially after the realization that all the services were down.
[/QUOTE]
Land. Line.

Good grief.

And everyone who notices their cell has died and is on call will find some other way of making the contact, coming in to work themselves if necessary to report in if they have to. You’ll lose the people who were asleep. Which I don’t think really includes the brokers and sales reps.

It would take ten minutes to figure out what happened, as far as the populace is concerned - the cell networks are down. And if there’s pandemonium it wouldn’t be because of the actual loss of cell service - despite and in part because of your argument, that’s clearly absurd.

There might be panic if the populace thinks this is just the first wave of some terrorist attack, though. That would be a bit difference, and now that I think of it that would probably cause some unmerited concern. But once people noticed that no country had spared itself and that there was no follow-up, things would calm down as people realized how well fifteen-year-old technology still works.

Fighting the hypothetical, are we? The OP specificified phones. Just sayin’.

And so, as they back slowly away from their suddenly internetless computer, they quake in fear - and then turn on the TV and learn the news.

And then quake in fear of the upcoming wave two of the terrorist attaack. But not in fear of their stockbroker having to go to the office.

And knowing how much I rely on my cell phone, and how much my office does, I can tell you… oh, wait, I don’t have a cell. And my workplace doesn’t use 'em. I do have a friend who would be a little out of contact for a few days until she got land-line service turned on. I might have to hie me over to her apartment to see if she’s still alive!

I am not a bit worried. Any company which is incapable of recovering from a return to land lines deserves to go under, and we can manage perfectly well without them. And I mean that with absolute sincerity.

23

[QUOTE=begbert2]
What did they do before cell phones?
[/QUOTE]

What did people do before they had cars? They rode horses, drove buggies, or used shanks mare to get around. You don’t seriously think that we could go back to that today without any major disruptions, do you?

We aren’t geared to living without cell phones now, so in the short term people would be having serious communications problems. Car broke down? Well, better learn to walk or hitch a ride, since there is no way to call for a tow. At a shopping center and need to know what the wife needs from the store? Better drive back, since the store no longer has pay phones (least, none of the stores around here have them). Need to change plans with friends? Bummer, unless you catch them at home, since there won’t be any way to communicate with them away from a land line. Baby coming unexpectedly and doctor out playing a round of golf? Got to hate that, unless we can call the golf course and have them send someone out onto the course to physically find the guy and get him to the hospital. Large fire and the fire chief going to dinner somewhere? Oh well, leave a message on his machine and hope he doesn’t go out for drinks afterward.

We have adapted to this new technology, just like all previous technologies. We have revolved our business and personal practices around it, and we’ve optimized our lives for it’s use. Could we go back to no cell phones at this point? Sure…we’re pretty adaptable. But it would take time, and in the interim it would be as if any other crucial technology that we have adapted to is suddenly (and that’s the key) taken away…it would leave us with a rather large hole, and a scramble to jury rig something until we develop new processes and got other technologies into the pipeline to make up (simple things like having to put pay phones back in everywhere).

-XT

24

What did people do before they had cars? They rode horses, drove buggies, or used shanks mare to get around. You don’t seriously think that we could go back to that today without any major disruptions, do you?

We aren’t geared to living without cell phones now, so in the short term people would be having serious communications problems. Car broke down? Well, better learn to walk or hitch a ride, since there is no way to call for a tow. At a shopping center and need to know what the wife needs from the store? Better drive back, since the store no longer has pay phones (least, none of the stores around here have them). Need to change plans with friends? Bummer, unless you catch them at home, since there won’t be any way to communicate with them away from a land line. Baby coming unexpectedly and doctor out playing a round of golf? Got to hate that, unless we can call the golf course and have them send someone out onto the course to physically find the guy and get him to the hospital. Large fire and the fire chief going to dinner somewhere? Oh well, leave a message on his machine and hope he doesn’t go out for drinks afterward.

We have adapted to this new technology, just like all previous technologies. We have revolved our business and personal practices around it, and we’ve optimized our lives for it’s use. Could we go back to no cell phones at this point? Sure…we’re pretty adaptable. But it would take time, and in the interim it would be as if any other crucial technology that we have adapted to is suddenly (and that’s the key) taken away…it would leave us with a rather large hole, and a scramble to jury rig something until we develop new processes and got other technologies into the pipeline to make up (simple things like having to put pay phones back in everywhere).

-XT
[/QUOTE]
So what you’re saying is, in a mere 15 years all you cell phone users have become so dependent on these cell-phone thingys that you’re all incapable of reacting to the loss? You think the doctor will still go to the golf course while he’s on call, and that the fire station will still let all the people there wander off and leave it unoccupied? (This happens? :dubious:)

You’ve got me about the car breaking down, or those people who’ve lost the ability to write and thus can’t make a list, and who have friends that can’t keep appointments. They will surely be mildly inconvenienced. The World Is Surely Ended.

Cars are crucial. Electricity is crucial. Computers are crucial (due to the information currently locked within them).

Internet is important.

Cell phones are convenient.

There’s a continuum, see.

25

[QUOTE=begbert2]
Land. Line.
[/QUOTE]

And if you don’t have one? Or if you don’t happen to be where one is? Like, say, if you happen to be out at the movies? Or on vacation?

Again, we will eventually adapt, but you seem to think we could instantly do so, and that is, simply put, wrong.

They will…eventually. And in the mean time, it will be a disruption to business and to peoples day to day lives.

People don’t react well to sudden and catastrophic change. It’s not absurd at all. Perhaps ‘pandemonium’ is too strong a term, as it connotates folks running in the street screaming in panic, but I think the panic would be there both in the business world and in peoples personal lives, as they try and fill in the whole it will make and patch together the communications it will disrupt.

Something as simple as you dropping your kids off at the mall and telling them to call when they are done. No call comes. You try and call, but you get nothing on your phone. You go home and use that ‘Land. Line.’, and…nothing. What do you do? Go to the mall and wander about, hoping to find them? Multiply that by several million now, and put in all the other special instances, emergencies, and other disruptions that would happen suddenly if the system went down and you will start to see it wouldn’t be the no big deal thingy you seem to think it would be.

Again, could we adapt? Certainly. But it would take time and resources to do it, and initially it would be a large problem. And it would be a larger problem in some countries than even here in the US, since we rely more heavily on ground lines for communication and data than some other countries do.

Well, they use the same network…how is it reasonable that only VOICE traffic for cell systems would be effected?? That doesn’t even make any sense at all. For that matter, why would ONLY cell systems go down? It’s just radio. Why would whatever effect that and not other radio systems? Microwave systems? Internet systems?

Uhuh. ‘And so, as their cars stop working, they quake in fear - and they go out and get a horse and get their ass to work.’ Sure they would. No problem, just turn the TV on. :stuck_out_tongue:

Sadly, my TV uses a satellite network thingy, and some folks use this new fangled thingy called ‘broadband’…but I’m sure I have a pair of rabbit ears around somewhere, and I’m sure someone is still broadcasting…oh, wait! Well, maybe if we got a really long string and some tin cans…

Of course, since it’s ONLY cell service (and not data either), I suppose the satellite and broadband networks would be safe, so I guess we could all just turn on the TV and find out what’s going on, and all feel safe and happy knowing that. No reason to panic at all, so therefore, all being rational humans, we wouldn’t panic…just go about our daily lives as we did before cell phones were invented. Yeah…that’s likely.

‘My wife is going into labor!’ ‘Oh…well, unfortunately the doctor is out to dinner tonight’ ‘Well call him up!’ ‘I’m sorry sir, but he didn’t say where he was going since he had his cell phone and pager with him’ ‘Aren’t there any other doctors in this hospital! She is going into labor right now!’ ‘The on call doctor is here, but he’s dealing with all the other people having emergencies tonight since we can’t get a hold of those doctors either…’

If it was just stockbrokers you’d have a point. But it wouldn’t be. It would be basically everyone. Everyone who isn’t sitting at home or in their office right next to their phone…and, always assuming that the phone system didn’t get bogged down with all the heavier than usual calling due to the fact that people would be panicking, since they couldn’t use their cell phones anymore.

So…because you don’t use one and don’t rely on one, that means that no one does or should? :stuck_out_tongue: I have a friend who doesn’t use a car…that mean no one should panic if they suddenly stopped working?

I know you are sincere. That’s what makes it so sad. Oh well, happily for you and the world, the odds of the entire cell system going tits up all at once and permanently is pretty small. So, we’ll never have to find out how frightening the actual impact of it all going down would really be.

-XT

26

Don’t forget, myself and a large number of people would go back to unemployment. You think the economy is bad now, this would be massive. And the disruptions in the way business is handled in so many industries would probably mean many would go under, adding to the unemployment problem even more. And with the permanent loss of productivity, I would not be surprised by a lasting Depression.

27

Let me be nice and succinct, xtime. Yes, there would be some conseternation in the case of a sudden loss of cell phone service. But it would be resolved in hours. For probably 99.9% of the population, all those people whose kids are lost and alone at that mall seven planets away, we’re talking, like, five hours, tops. Doctors and Fire service and those precious, precious stockbrokers? 24. Tops.

And these epic tragedies you’re talking about? They happen all the time. Cell phones get lost. They get misplaced. They get left behind. And my favorite, the constant bane that makes my female friend near-uncontactable half the time, the get left turned off.

If there were a shred of truth to the screaming panic you predict, every time one of these very common events occured people would be spontaneously combusting all over the place. But they don’t, becuase it’s nowhere near so big a deal as you assert. And in fact I’d say that because these user errors do so frequently occur, most people are already acclimatized to temporary loss of cell service, removing the last few teeth from your proposed disaster. Yes, there would be some inconvenience gumming at people for a little while, exactly comparable to that time my friend left her cell at my place a month ago and was ENTIRELY WITHOUT CELL SERVICE for 48 hours. She’s dead now, unfortunately, but I think that despite that most people would be able to pull through.

28

What business are you in?

And I think that most businesses could recover - certainly there would not be a significant permanent loss of productivity.

29

Ack! Sorry, xtisme, I didn’t mean to leave the ‘s’ out of your name like that. I apologise.

30

Well, my cell phone has stopped working lots of times, and I haven’t paniced yet. I think everyone would assume it was only their phone out, and since they couldn’t talk to anyone else, they wouldn’t know it was a global problem. I guess if you are old enough, you wouldn’t miss it that much.
It would be detrimental to the economy for a short time, but creating a new means of portable communication would be a huge economic boost.
One question though, what could happen to just the cell system without having a much greater effect on all radio communications or electronic systems?

31

Maybe a cell phone virus? (Or a suite of them?) Or perhaps a concentrated digital or physical attack on the cell phone rebroadcast towers. (Yes, I know, but in the thread that spawned this one the premise was that money was no object.)

32

How about a company whose primary business is cell phone software?

33

There are some places in the world where land lines were never built, because cell phones made them unnecessary.

34

If there are no more cell phones, then we can manage perfectly well without them now can’t we?

And I’d even go so far as to say that any company that persists in trying to sell cell phone software when there are no cell phones to use it on does deserve to go under too, if not at a moral level, at a level of practicality.

35

True. This would extend the ‘turmoil time’ in those places to weeks or even months, depending on how quick the people with dollar signs in their eyes can get the cable unrolled. I suspect that things like fire departments, police, and hospitals would tend to get first dibs, though.

ETA: I still think the wheels of society will manage to keep on turning in such places in the meantime, though, if a little less smoothly.

36

[QUOTE=begbert2]
Let me be nice and succinct, xtime. Yes, there would be some conseternation in the case of a sudden loss of cell phone service. But it would be resolved in hours. For probably 99.9% of the population, all those people whose kids are lost and alone at that mall seven planets away, we’re talking, like, five hours, tops. Doctors and Fire service and those precious, precious stockbrokers? 24. Tops.
[/QUOTE]

Let me be equally succinct…you are wrong. Assuming the network was down for the count, and cell service wasn’t restored, it would take months to resolve things and change business practices, and in the mean time there would be a lot of disruptions and a scramble to try and restructure business practices and procedures.

For instance, our fire department here? They use a paging system and automated cell phone messages. Ok, so no cell services then they would just sit by the phones, right? Sure they would…but it would mean a disruption in their lives and a change of how people are on call. Plus it would take changing all the paging and auto-messaging system. Would it take 24 hours? Sure…if that was all they had to do. But the police are in a similar boat. As are a lot of the other emergency services. And who’d be doing it? We would…but then, we’d need to change it for ourselves as well.

Would we get by? Sure we would…but it would be a disruption in the level of service at the town/city level. And the county level. And the state level. And the federal government level. And this is without even getting into what it would do to the business community.

They do…but they get lost on an individual level. An individual loses their phone…and it’s a disruption to them, as an individual. But if you lose your phone, you can still call all the other people who haven’t. You can still call fire and rescue and be assured that the folks on call will actually respond. It’s when stuff happens to a LOT of folks that you get ‘epic tragedies’. Sort of like Katrina. If one guys house gets flooded, well, it sucks to be that guy, no doubt about it. If one small town gets flooded, well, that’s worse, but not ‘epic’. However, if a city of millions gets flooded, well, that’s when things start getting ‘epic’.

No…not at all. You are equating something happening to one person and trying to extrapolate that to it happening to hundreds of millions or even billions if we are talking world wide.

The thing is, they ARE as big a deal as I’m asserting. You seem to think that cell phones are just toys. And you are right…they ARE toys, for many. But they are also tools, and we have structured much of our society around their use. You don’t use one or have one, but 10’s or even 100’s of millions of your fellow citizens DO. And a large number of people depend on them…even if they don’t have one of their own, like you. You depend on all the people who DO have one and are on call somewhere, able to NOT have to be in the office or tied to a land line, waiting for an emergency. Because that’s the way we structure and streamline our business today. Otherwise we have to pay folks to sit around next to a land line waiting for it to ring, like we did in the old days.

To be sure, we COULD go back to that…but it will take time to adjust, and it will certainly cost money. As an example, I’m on call next week. I don’t get paid for that, unless I actually get called. That’s because all I need to do to be ‘on call’ is carry my Blackberry with me, which will update me on the status of the network (alerts for problems or issues), call me with an automated emergency call if there is a serious problem, etc. If I don’t have the cell phone, I have to wait by the phone, possibly VPN’ed into the system with a monitor up of the network…and I ain’t gonna do that for free. Not only that, but the security monitoring vendor would have to staff THEIR office with an actual person as well, sitting by a land line (probably a bunch of them), and Emergency Services would need to do the same thing…all to make sure I got the call if there was a problem. And that’s just ME…multiply that a couple million times to get the true scope of the problem, and then think about how long it would take to make just the simple change to ensure that XT gets a call if there is an issue at the office.

No worries man. :slight_smile: Here’s the thing…I really like you, even though you and I are not always on the same ‘side’ of any given debate. I don’t want to get into a heated, snarky fight with you on this. I understand that you don’t believe it would be a major issue. I concede that I don’t know exactly WHAT the level of problem would be…it’s not exactly my area of expertise, though there are some parallels to what I do for a living. I know it would be worse than a mere 24 hours of outages and then back to business as usual. It would cost literally billions, even if they managed to get the network back up at some point. That alone would be major. Would it be the end of the world? No…I’m not saying that (though throw in radio and land line/internet communications and I the potential is there for the end of the world as we know it) but it would be bad. Much worse than people seem to think.

Anyway, we can agree to disagree if you like. I doubt that there are any studies that either of us could get a hold of to ‘prove’ our case, one way or the other. I’m sure there ARE such studies, mind, but they wouldn’t be something available to the general public…they would be part of a disaster planning study (I’ve seen several, but never one on this particular subject, BTW). So it’s going to simply be a matter of opinion.

-XT

37

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…)

-XT
[/QUOTE]

Thank you for that. It drives me nuts when people make the “we got along without them just fine a few years ago” argument. We also managed to live through not having running water, easy access to medical help and not having cars. All things that would be a major problem if they disappeared.
I don’t think many people understand how their lives would be impacted without cell phones even though they, personally, don’t need one. Here’s a very small example. A trucker is delivering a load to a warehouse 1500 miles away. He drops off the load and heads back to his depot empty handed because there wasn’t anything to haul back to his hometown. Just as he leaves his dispatcher gets an order for a shipment very close to his drop off point. The dispatcher calls the warehouse, finds out the driver has already been there and gone. The dispatcher can now either send another truck all the way there, or wait for this guy to get back and then send him out again. A cell phone would have been helpful (not all truckers use CBs). Eventually the trucking industry would have to raise their rates to account for the extra driving. That cost will eventually make it back to the consumer.

38

I don’t know XT, we haven’t been dependent on cell phones all that long, and most of the land lines are still there, along with internet communications and other radio communication according to the scenario. Annoying certainly, firemen and policemen would have to stay near a phone to be reached, but not necessarily sitting at home. And if they have a scanner they can hear the calls, and just have to find a means to call in.
Ten years from now, and the alternate methods of communication may dwindle to the point where it would be disastrous though. You bring up a good point about emergency planning though. Contigency plans should include the circumstances of cellular service being unavailable.

39

It was already covered, but it’s worth mentioning again. There’s a monumental difference between one person’s cell phone not working and all of them not working. It’s like the difference between no electricity on my block vs no electricity in my county (that’s houses, street lights, police, fire, hospital, airport…no emergency backup power/generators etc…)

40

From your lips to God’s ears, OP. Life couldn’t help but be better with people having to talk to each other instead of always focusing on their electronic nannies, parents might have to start trusting their kids again, work might once again be something largely left at the office…

Where’s the downside? We go back to America circa 1982, and that’s fine with me. I was a young kid back then, and somehow I survived into adulthood without them. Everybody else will as well if they go away.