[QUOTE=begbert2]
The fact that it’s only been 15 years is important because your entire argument is “we can’t possibly go back/”
[/QUOTE]
Of course, I’m not saying that ‘we can’t possibly go back’…that’s YOUR strawman.
Everything looks easy when you have no idea what it entails to do it.
Then there really is no point in continuing the discussion, is there? I know there would be a greater disruption (in fact, I have a sneaking suspicion I might be downplaying the actual effect), while you think you understand the problems, but really don’t. So, I’m not seeing the point in me continuing to say the same things over and over again…or have you say the same things back to me over and over again.
As I said earlier, fortunately we won’t ever have to find out what would actually happen.
[QUOTE=begbert2]
I think our point is that while there may well be business models that have been invented in the last ten years which rely on cell phones, well, there are still people around who remember the old business models, and any business that’s been around longer than that probably still has all the old policy manuals lying around from back then.
[/QUOTE]
Again, no argument from me…of COURSE there are folks around who remember the ‘old’ business model. Hell, I was working before cell phones were invented. There are probably still folks who remember how to run a steam powered rail road too, and if it came down to it, we COULD go back to coal burning steam engines…it would just take time, resources, and a lot of disruptions.
You are talking about shifting production, changing business practices, changing SOPs and personnel staffing requirements, and then hand waving all that away as if it were nothing. And you are taking about this happening across the board, in every single industry, business, government facility…and not just in one country but around the world for gods sake! Seriously…I don’t believe that you guys are grasping the scale. Even a small change, a minuscule change, can cause disruptions when it happens in a single industry. You are talking about a non-small change, and not in one industry or even one country, but world wide.
Of course, I’m not saying that ‘we can’t possibly go back’…that’s YOUR strawman.
[/QUOTE]
Okay, let me try it again - ‘we can’t possibly go back - before society crumbles around us’
You anticipate:
companies needing to spend large amounts of money ‘retooling’ (buying phones, in worst cases running cable and/or buying walkie-talkies), which would presumably take unspeakably long.
more staff would need to be hired and trained to be secretaries.
All the existing staff that have been spoiled by cell phones would quit and new people would have to be hired.
Have I missed anything? My, it’s such a shame that there is so little employment at the moment, it’s going to be dashedly hard to find those office workers, and everyone’s going to be champing at the bit to quit.
There is one other thing you may not have mentioned - that there may not be enough land-line phones available on short notice. Being absolutely pessimistic, of course, this might require the complete manufacture of factories from the foundation up before manufacturing can begin, which would obviously be a significant delay - though I somehow doubt that would be required. But I suppose that with realistic pessimism it might take three or four weeks before the shelves stop being cleared. Of course businesses would probably have an edge over peasants in getting their orders filled, I would imagine.
Or when I can categorically prove that it can be easily done by the fact we were just doing it a few years ago.
Do the problems involve anything other than a hit to the company’s efficiency of operations? (Which I am 100% confident would be 95% temporary, not to digress.) And this hit to efficiency would take a bite out of the bottom line, yes?
Do you imagine there would any fallout beyond that? I don’t see how this would cause the company to go under, unless it was teetering so close to the edge that a single ordinary hiccup in their business flow would scuttle them. The loss of efficiency wouldn’t even be likely to hurt their place in the marketplace, because most or all of their competitors would be suffering similarly.
Pessimistically speaking we’re talking about 85% of the world being essentially put on hold for one to four weeks - not including doctors, fire, police, or anyone truly necessary. One could speculate a market crash without stretching plausibility - expecially if one presumes that everyone is (rather reasonably) expecting another shoe to drop. But the notion that without a panic that all business will grind to a semipermanent halt strikes me as seriously underestimating peoples’ drive to make money.
Again, no argument from me…of COURSE there are folks around who remember the ‘old’ business model. Hell, I was working before cell phones were invented. There are probably still folks who remember how to run a steam powered rail road too, and if it came down to it, we COULD go back to coal burning steam engines…it would just take time, resources, and a lot of disruptions.
[/QUOTE]
Again with the comparison with things that would require massive manufacturing efforts and infrastructure reconstruction and training of an entire staff from essentially the ground up. And again with a kick in the testicles of your credibility.
Explain this shifting production, please. We’re talking about cell phones going out, not factories.
And again, of course there would be distruption. People’s job descriptions would change in the blink of an eye- you there! No being on call! Longer hours for two weeks! And you have to use the internet for your remote conferences! And for the love of Hel get online right now and order us some phones before they’re all gone and we have to buy begbert2’s spare phone off EBay for $200!
The thing is, there are only two possible disruptions that could happen that we couldn’t trivially deal with with the resources available: 1) no land lines in the area, or 2) not enough non-cell phones to go around. Everything else is provably correctable nigh-instantly, by virtue of the fact it just requires changes in employee behavior. Right?
Besides the bulk of my argument? Other than that, Ms. Lincoln, how WAS the play??
It’s not a matter of there being enough, or not enough…it’s a matter of changing directions and re-tasking them. Oh, I’m sure there aren’t enough pay phones or the older infrastructure supporting them to meet immediate demand in the face of something like this, but it’s the cumulative effect of so many different problems impacting at once.
Sure…maybe it would only take a day. Plus, with all those folks out of work it would be easy for business and government to simply hire all the folks they need. They could probably get the wino on the street corner to work up their new business flow by day after tomorrow, and have everything restructured before the weekend! I’m sure if they throw some magic pixie dust in as well everything will be good…heck, it would probably end the recession, feed all the people in Africa and bring about world peace! Hell, maybe we should just go ahead and kill those cell phones on purpose, it will be such a non-event.
We were doing a lot of things a few years ago that we don’t do today. You have yet, unfortunately, to ‘prove’ that it would be done easily. You haven’t even given me a technically and economically valid LOGICAL argument on why or how it would be ‘easy’…just a lot of uninformed speculation and assertion that it would be because we did it before.
Why yes…and I’ve pointed some of them out.
To further digress, 99% of the stats given by you in this thread are simply made up on the spot.
Certainly.
Yeah…I imagine there will be fallout beyond that, as I’ve said. Besides the mere hit to the bottom line (something I’m sure most 'dopers are militantly unconcerned by), there will be disruptions in things like emergency services and other basic services the public takes for granted (of course, this is easily solvable by simply hiring all those unemployed people and making folks use a telephone, and all that easy stuff like that), plus there will be an impact on the social aspects of using mobile devices and a period where people would have to adjust to the reality of not being able to use the things (a couple of days, at most, since people are SO adaptable and all, and really massive changes like this with no notice).
Well, a company making cell phones or part of the secondary and tertiary manufacturing and development of cell phone technologies, and all the companies who are involved in the marketing and sales of cell phones, and all those related industries would probably disagree with you here. Leaving aside all THOSE folks who would over night be out of jobs, and the economic impact as all the companies involved in any of those things cratered in the stock market, I’d say that companies in completely unrelated industries would probably take a hit in any case. Either a direct hit because they currently rely on cell phones and have to restructure their business practices and hire folks to do stuff that is currently being done using cell phones, or indirectly because they buy products or services from companies who are now having to refocus and retool. Even without disruptions of any kind it would take time to shift manufacturing or shipping because there would suddenly be a lot more demand on technologies to replace cell phones. See, if basically EVERYONE needs something that isn’t being manufactured for everyone right this minute, it takes more than a day or two to shift production and ship all the stuff needed to effect the change…and this is without any sort of disruption, with everyone just basically staying calm and collected, and shrugging their collective shoulders and saying ‘oh well, no more cell phones…guess we’ll just go back to land lines’.
Why would this not include doctors, fire, police or anyone ‘truly necessary’? (I won’t ask where you pulled the 85% out of). Hospitals are one of the biggest adopters of the ‘new’ technology and would have to make a lot of fairly radical changes in how they operated. Fire and police as well, as they also rely rather heavily on cell phones and pagers. For instance, most police and fire vehicles in my county use cellular data systems for the computers in their cars. I’m sure this is just a luxury, and they don’t NEED them or anything like that, and I’m sure that we here in New Mexico are on the cutting edge of technology so it’s highly unlikely anyone else in the world has such things in their vehicles, but it would probably disrupt at least the poor citizens of New Mexico, if nothing else. As for the other folks who are ‘truly necessary’, I guess it would depend on your definition of that term. I can think of a number of critical personnel and services that rely on cellular systems, if for nothing else than as I’ve repeatedly pointed out, contacting people…but then, I’ve repeatedly pointed this out, yet it doesn’t seem to have made a difference, so no point in repeating the repeat.
I think you are seriously overestimating people/business/governments ability to handle radical and abrupt change in the short term. I can easily see many services and businesses being seriously disrupted and scrambling to implement quick fixes, and the strain that would put on production that is currently oriented in a different direction, can certainly see how you’d have a cascade effect of problems that could and probably would overwhelm a lot of the folks who plan and manage business and government…and I can see how that, coupled with what would probably be a big hit to the stock market, disruption of services people take for granted, disruption of the work flow and load people are used to and with peoples natural tendency to panic about stuff like this would only add fuel to the fire.
[QUOTE=begbert2]
Explain this shifting production, please. We’re talking about cell phones going out, not factories.
[/QUOTE]
Company A is currently making X number of VoIP phones and has Y number of them in stock because they project Z demand. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the demand is Z*(a huge new demand). They simply can’t meet that demand in the short term because they have no way to scale up production in ‘a couple of days’…plus, they are having to struggle with restructuring their on call engineering, sales and help desk staff to the new reality. Oh, and since they don’t manufacture every single part or Martha Steward-esqely go out and mine all the raw materials and then refine then for every part, they are being impacted by the same things happening to their suppliers. Ah, and almost forgot…one of their suppliers for widget R12345 is heavily involved in supplying parts for cell phones, and they just went belly up, so a replacement company will need to be found to supply that widget. And…and…and…
Just a little shift could cause huge down stream problems, and we aren’t talking about a little change. We’re talking about a big 800 lb gorilla change here that is going to effect pretty much everyone, across the board. People who can supply the stuff needed to fix the problem or at least temporarily stop gap it will suddenly have their products in huge demand without a lot of initial supply, which means that whole supply/demand thingy comes into play.
As yet another ‘for instance’ that probably won’t phase you, as I’ve said, my office doesn’t have land lines atm. We use cell phones for it all. In order to make just the basic change, we’d need to put a hand set on everyone’s desk. That means we’ll need: A compatible layer 2 switch and the hand sets (happily we already have the VoIP system, and it would just be programming to switch things over to a new hunt group and answering system). That’s just the hardware. Should be no problem, right? However, a CISCO 3750 POE switch (which is what we use) would take (today…without the high demand) at least a couple of weeks to a month to purchase (if we cut through all the procurement BS and red tape)…and the Mitel hand sets would take about the same amount of time to get (with the same caveats). We don’t have any spare switches (since we use Smartnet), and only a couple of spare handsets.
And that’s just US…that doesn’t include all the other municipal, state or federal agencies that might be in a similar boat. Doesn’t include what we’d have to do for the police, fire or rescue (frankly, I have no idea what we WOULD do, at least as far as their vehicles goes…I guess buy them newer, more capable radios and put in a hell of a lot more folks into dispatch to look stuff up for them when they are on the road). And THAT doesn’t include all the businesses that would also be trying to get what they need.
Besides the bulk of my argument? Other than that, Ms. Lincoln, how WAS the play??
[/QUOTE]
Then I’m afraid I can’t find the bulk of your argument, besides “cops and firefighters don’t know how to use non-cell phones”
Shutting down all of society for a week or two, yes. Though this personally, I would say this isn’t cumulative; it’s simulataneous. Cumulative implies that the problems build beyond the sum of their individual difficulties, which you haven’t shown and I see no reason to believe will happen outside of hardware shortages.
As opposed to your view, where everyone throws their hands up and burns their office buildings down and moves into cardboard boxes because it’s just impossible to schedule a meeting if you only have the entire internet to use to communicate with.
The thing is, I’m not even sure that’s a strawman. It’s darned hard to tell how you think people will react - except you seem sure they won’t just switch their business practices to using land lines (and internet).
Sure I have - we did it yesterday, we can do it tomorrow. There are no new processes to develop, no new ideas to develop, nothing untested to gamble on; it’s all there. It’s logically CERTAIN that we can do what we did yesterday - unless the hardware is missing, of course.
How that rather obvious fact is eluding you eludes me.
Not that I’ve seen. Perhaps it you extracted them from contexts and reduced them to a list of simple and clear bullet points? Effects of losing cell phones that would impact businesses in ways besides hittin to the company’s efficiency of operations. Note that demanding that you do a second job as a secretary, or having to pay you more to do (essentially) the same work of keeping you near a phone would be hits against efficiency.
Everyone knows that 87% of statistics are made up on the spot. Which would including your ephemeral “bad things will happen, worse than I can speculate!” one.
They wouldn’t have to hire a single additional doctor, policeman, or fireman. The are already equipped with radios in their vehicles. They already have “secretaries” (aka dispatchers). They already don’t need cell phones to do squat with their work, aside from a few conveniences that they did without before and can do without again.
All essential services are industries that are older than fifteen years old. (With the possible exception of “cell phone tower technician”.) And any doctor that has duties will suck up not golfing while on call.
Cell phones are simply, obviously, and provably not that integral to the functioning of our society. They may be desperately necessary for the house-flipper market or whichever, but essential services can do without 'em just fine.
“hire folks to do stuff that is currently being done using cell phones”? Your cell phones are driving cars, pushing buttons, and, er, answering phones?
And, again, “retool”? They’re fricking cell phones, man. They’re not an integral part of a physical manufacturing process.
It’s already noted that it would take a week or, maybe, two for the slow companies to get around having to answer a land line. Companies that can’t live without them, die.
And yes, I’ve already mentioned that there would be a natural shift in market demand to competing technologies; whole factories to make land-line phones will spring up in the wilderness like poppies! But wouldn’t this be a good thing, to counter the companies folding because they do nothing but make cell phones?
So, what precisely happens if the computers in the police cars stop working? Do the cops stay home? Open the jails? Cease to write tickets (allow 24 hours to dig out the old books of paper tickets, if necessary)? Refuse to use their radios out of protest?
And this whole “contacting people” thing - absurd, because it requires you to assume that nobody will change their behaviors in the slightest to accomodate this world-changing event. “On Call” will go from golfing with a cell phone to golfing without one; they can’t be contacted; oh no!
As I said, absurd. If a doctor or fire chief know that they need to be contactable, they will alter their schedule and behaviors to be as contactable as necessary, because, y’know, the world doesn’t revolve around them. And they know it. Duty calls! (Especially during what would doubtless be considered a national crisis, yeah?)
Now, there might be some prissy stock broker who is like, “I will not come in to work five days a week! I simply won’t!”
Fire his ass.
MEMO - All departments. Persons on-call will be required to make continue to make themselves contactable during their on-call period; whatever that requires. If necessary submit alternate contact information to your manager. (If email is used it is expected that it will be checked frequently.) Sales and customer service representatives should compose a letter to our customers to use the internet to contact us in this time of crisis; in-house phone lines will be allocated to employees as come available, in order of priority.
I’ll concede a moderate hit to the stock market from phone companies failing (who knew that 58.8 of american industry was the manufacture of cell phones and cell phone aps?). And panic could easily ensure regardless due to “other shoe drop” syntrome. But in return I reject that any significant percentage of businesses will be unable to cope, and I emphatically reject that the cops and fire department will wander around in a daze or that any service (besides cell phone service) will be noticeably disrupted. Emphatically reject with mockery. Mock, mock, mock.
Company A is currently making X number of VoIP phones and has Y number of them in stock because they project Z demand. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the demand is Z*(a huge new demand). They simply can’t meet that demand in the short term because they have no way to scale up production in ‘a couple of days’…plus, they are having to struggle with restructuring their on call engineering, sales and help desk staff to the new reality. Oh, and since they don’t manufacture every single part or Martha Steward-esqely go out and mine all the raw materials and then refine then for every part, they are being impacted by the same things happening to their suppliers. Ah, and almost forgot…one of their suppliers for widget R12345 is heavily involved in supplying parts for cell phones, and they just went belly up, so a replacement company will need to be found to supply that widget. And…and…and…
[/QUOTE]
Ah, okay. Hardware shortages. That thing I already conceded would take longer (how long, I’m not sure - there would be a lot of financial incentive to be first on the market). Why didn’t you just say so?
Right, right. (Nods sagely.) Supplying the missing hardware is going to be an issue, which will be big money to those who can pull it off, pumping life into the market nearly as fast as it drains it from cell phone manufacturers. Right?
And without the phones, I presume that everyone’s just going to take off and go home, right? I assume you’re all incapable of temporarily switching to some other communication method? And incapable of using smaller stopgap systems for those who absolutely need telephones?
Well, I’m sure if you are, then your competitor down the block will figure something out. Good for him, eh?
Emergency services would deal with things, with stopgaps if necessary; they have jobs to do.
No - right. You lot are not unable to function without cell phones, or even without voip phones; you just need to change your behavior. And for the retooling stuff, that was specifically excepted of course.
But why should they? Why should they have to deal with stopgaps that might be almost as good, but not quite, when we have the means right now to provide real cell phone communication abilities?
You say things like, “People lived for years before cell phones were invented.”. In the aggregate that’s true, but in the specific it’s often false. Some people did die in those days who would have lived if they had been able to call someone on a cell phone. Some people nowadays are saved because they can call someone to rescue them on a cell phone.
So why should we eliminate this capability? The people saved makes it worth it.
My entire discussion with xtisme is basically taking place in the first few weeks/months/decades after the sudden loss of cell phones, during the period before society can successfully implement a new technology that fills the hole. Or, alternatively, until they can hunt down and install an existing technology that adequately fills the hole.
That’s the interesting part of the discussion, you see; if you look later in the timeline after the point where people have gotten used to not having cell phones, and are now doing things fifteen times more efficiently than ever using their telepathy helmets, I think even xtisme would admit that the losses would have been completely overcome.
[QUOTE=begbert2]
Then I’m afraid I can’t find the bulk of your argument, besides “cops and firefighters don’t know how to use non-cell phones”
[/QUOTE]
Too funny…especially considering I’m not even saying this silly Cliff’s Notes version. That I presume you THINK this is what I’m saying I can only attribute to my lack of writing ability.
But I’m not saying that this WILL cause a systemic failure (which I presume is what you meant by ‘implies that the problems build beyond the sum of their individual difficulties’)…I’m saying that there will be shortages and disconnects that will last beyond your sunny couple of days assertion…or couple of weeks. I’m thinking it’s more like months or even a year or two, and that in the mean time the level of expected services will be degraded, as will the economy. It MIGHT lead to systemic failure, but I don’t know how probably that would be, since I’m not a disaster planner and have never looked at the nuts and bolts of what such an improbable event would have on society, government and business.
Again, this isn’t even vaguely what I’m saying.
Well, I’m sure it is. What I’ve been saying is that people will react badly, especially initially, and that critical and non-critical services will get disrupted. That’s not ‘everyone throws their hands up and burns their office buildings down and moves into cardboard boxes because it’s just impossible to schedule a meeting if you only have the entire internet to use to communicate with’, it’s ‘there will be panic, and businesses and governments will be scrambling to make adjustments and put in place stop gap measures to get over the hump’. You are portraying a hopelessly sunny and unrealistic view of such an event, and I’m trying (obviously without success) to toss in some realism to discussion.
As I’ve already said, I don’t KNOW what all the ramifications would be…I just know it would be more of an event that a couple of days of mild annoyance while folks figure out they just need to go back to the office and user their phones.
Well, the exact percentage varies, depending on who is making the assertion. As you stand by your out of the ass assertions, I stand by my own…bad things will certainly happen, and there will be all sorts of unintended consequences and ramifications to such an event. Worse than I can speculate? No…I said there MAY be worse things than I’m speculating, not that there will be. And, again, I would say that this is valid…it might be worse than I’m speculating. My guess is, if we were looking through real disaster planning documents concerning this, there would be a best, middle and worst case scenario…mine would probably be somewhere between best and middle. Yours would be off the scale on the ‘best case’ side.
If only it were this easy.
Well, I’m one up on you then…while my stance obviously mystifies you, your own is quite understandable to me. I’ve seen it all my life from folks who make decisions about their companies and who think they know what the impact of a major network or system outage would be on their business without actually understanding either how intertwined the systems have become to their business process or the technology, or even the real risks. I’ve literally heard the exact same confident assertions from CEO’s and CFO’s, business owners and program manages, on both the government and commercial side. They confidently assert such until there is an ACTUAL failure, and then they discover that they should have paid a wee bit more attention to what the folks who understand the technology and who have looked into how dependent on the technology their business has become are telling them.
Mind, I’m not saying I have any special expertise concerning cellular systems and risk management of such systems, or disaster planning on this topic…I’m just saying I’ve heard the same things said in areas where I DO have some expertise.
Probably not…but the ones you have will have to change the way they do things, and it’s going to put additional strains on them. And initially you MAY have to hire more before things settle out.
Why yes…I think you are right! I believe when I was helping to engineer the current system we are using I DID see a radio in there! Thanks for putting that in italics…it was very helpful.
Now, going back to re-read what I actually wrote, you will see I was talking about the DATA systems in the police, fire and rescue vehicles. Those work on cellular. Really quickly, and without italics, a ‘radio’ is something you press a button and talk into. That’s pretty much all it does. Press. Talk. The vehicles, however, have those computer thingies in them, with all that information stuff in it. Press the radio, talk, computer just sits there doing nothing, since it can’t, you know, hear the radio.
Now, you COULD build a radio network that would allow for the transmission of data, and give you the same capabilities that the police, fire, rescue and emergency vehicles currently have. You just can’t do it in a couple of days.
You really don’t have a clue how any of this stuff works, do you? The data system used by police etc are simply ‘conveniences’ that they can ‘do without’…and the dispatchers are going to simply be able to pick up the slack? In a couple of days? Seriously?
Incredible. And you think this makes a difference why? Because they will simply remember how to operate the way they used too before they integrated the technology into their systems and became dependent on it?? Well, of COURSE you do…you think that data links in squad cars are just a ‘convenience’ that can easily be dispensed with. Just call dispatch and they will tell you everything you need to know! That’s what they did in the old days, and I’m sure that the dispatchers will be able to just pick up the slack with their current staffing and infrastructure levels! Well, in a couple days at most.
Oh, certainly. That’s really the only reason they need cell phones and pagers…so the dirty bastards can play golf! And the fix is that they will just have to suck it up. I’m sure that will be another miraculously smooth transition that folks will just do, happily, eagerly!
Hell, why do we even have the things, right? We don’t need em…well, unless we are house-flippers or scum like that! No one really uses the things anyway…it’s just a ‘convenience’ after all.
You would need to hire people to do all the manual stuff that is done currently using cell phones. See, if you now require me to be parked in front of a phone, I can’t do the other stuff I WAS doing when I was free to move about because you could contact me via cell phone. You want dispatchers (a.k.a. ‘secretaries’) to look up all the information that the police currently use, since they can’t look it up themselves when they are driving around…so, you are going to need more of them to do that.
As I pointed out earlier (in another post you obviously didn’t read), our system automatically monitors the network and alerts us (via…CELL PHONE AND PAGER) when there are network problems and issues. So, while I’m over at one facility working an issue I can get a text message an page about an outage somewhere else. Sadly, with no cell phone or pager I won’t be able to get that message, which means you need another one of me waiting by a ‘Land. Line.’ to get that trouble call…or, you have to accept that your service is going to be degraded, since I won’t be able to respond (or even know about) to a problem until I can call to check in or go back to my nice little office where my ‘Land. Line.’ will be there for my use.
Now, you might be thinking that, in the whole wide world only XT and his misfit organization operates in this crazy manner, so only we will be effected. Let me assure you that this is not the case, and in fact we aren’t even on the cutting edge of this technology…some organizations are even MORE dependent on this technology than we are! And fairly shortly WE will be more dependent, since we are thinking about shifting to more 3G/4G networking as well (plus getting those evil iPad thingies for everyone, so that we won’t need to connect laptops to local building networks work problems in the system).
Retool their business processes…such as my wasted demonstration above. On the physical side, companies who manufacture components for cell phones also manufacture components for other devices…and software developers do the same sorts of things. If cell phones all went down, then the companies who are directly and indirectly involved are going to also go down, and that could and probably will disrupt production of companies who manufacture VoIP phones or other land line systems.
Well, why didn’t you just say so…I mean, if it’s been noted and all, why are we still discussing this? First round is on you, right??
They can’t get the information they need, obviously. So, when they pull someone over, instead of going into the system to check them out, they have to call dispatch to have them look it up. No worries, right? It happens now when the system is interrupted. Trouble is, now EVERY cop, fire fighter, emergency rescue/response type is going to be calling into dispatch to get all that information they were getting directly into their vehicles.
If you can’t see that this would be a problem, or that the problems would be the silly ones you posted here, then I don’t know what to tell you…it’s not reality based. And, the funny thing is…the US is behind on really using this technology. Other countries are MUCH more heavily dependent on it because they are using it more efficiently and effectively, have integrated it more tightly with their process, and have been doing so for longer. We’d have a serious problem…some other countries (like Japan) it might be a disaster.
Again, I know you don’t get that this technology is used as extensively as it is. I get that…you think it’s a toy or a convenience, not vital. But the reality is that it’s a toy, a convenience AND it’s a vital tool that organizations have become dependent on. Even the toy and convenience angels would have a large impact on those of us who actually have and use cell phones in our personal lives…but it would have a much greater impact on organizations that use this technology extensively.
No…I think that people will HAVE to change their behavior, or else it would all fall apart. Also, I can think of ways around using cellular systems (assuming that, magically everything else works BUT cellular networks and systems). It will take time, however, to have people adjust, to have businesses adjust, to retool their processes and SOPs, probably to change their staffing levels, to get over the financial hit everyone would take, to work through all the other problems and issues, and then to get back on track. Time. Or, IOW, more than a week or two. And it will take even more time for people to adjust to the new reality, to go back to being tied to a land line telephone, to not being able to go out and golf or go to dinner or a movie or vacation, or to sending people into the field and being able to reach them and redirect them in transit, or while on a job somewhere, etc etc. Your simplistic ‘well, they just won’t be able to golf’ thingy isn’t even a good parody of all the things it will impact in peoples lives or organizations processes.
In general, I fire the whole person, but I suppose we all will have to change how we look at things and the processes we use…
It sounds like you are trying to dictate failure.
[/QUOTE]
To be sure…I’m in IT after all. Failure is ALWAYS an option!
No, what I’m trying to do is interject a bit of reality into the discussion, and a bit of pessimism as well. Honestly, that’s what IT guys do…we are all about the gloom and doom. The reason, especially for us old timers, is that we’ve seen what happens when systems fail, what the real world effects of a seemingly minor network issue can be and how they can impact an entire organization. It’s why we are obsessed with redundancy, with fault tolerance with, the holy of holies…BACKUPS!
And the disaster planning types are even more obsessive. I’ve been involved in disaster planning and recovery think tanks as a network resource, so I’ve seen a lot of how they think about stuff like what the OP is asking. I’ve seen how something I would consider to be a fairly minor problem can have much deeper consequences (or, at least they SAY it will) than what my common sense-o-meter would say it should have. I don’t know how they would come down on this one, but I’ll tell you that damn near ANYTHING that suddenly and world wide unavailable that had been available and used world wide, that the consequences wouldn’t be minor. I’m talking about if suddenly something as silly as lolly pops were unavailable world wide it would have a significant impact…let alone cell phones.
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I think there will be some disruptions, adjusted to in a reasonable amount of time.
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Sure, I think that things would eventually settle out and adjust as well…if not, then we’d be relearning the joys of hunting and gathering. But how long would it take, and how bad would the disruptions and disconnects be? I’m not sure, but I THINK it would be bad, especially initially, and that it would take quite a while before things settled down.
To me, there is a lot of potential for unexpected gotchas and unintended and unexpected consequences, as the butterfly flaps it’s wings in Ulaanbaatar and a gap toothed red neck farts in Alabama…
I’m just more optimistic about this particular scenario, you know, only cell phones, not land lines, internet, or other radio communication. And not so long since cell phones were irrelevant. Irrational fear will be the worst effect, and after a week, no one over the age of 30 will notice the difference.
You have pointed out something important though. There may not be many contigency plans for the situations where cellular service, or other communication methods become unavailable. I recall emergency plans in the past that considered the possibility of land line phones being unavailable. But that was easier to perceive as problem, what with the wires and all. But cell phones work by magic, so there probably hasn’t been much consideration of a potential problem.
Now if cable TV went out, well then the streets will be clogged with dead bodies.
This thread is a hypothetical discussion about what would happen if mobile phones (but, magically no other radio communication) stopped working.