I will respond at greater length later, but I find it interesting that you assume I use a cell phone.
And I think it’s absolutely certain that “a lot” of the people who “rely and depend” on those folks are relying them for their convenience and texting abilities.
There is no doubt whatsoever that a lot of people have phones. The question is if they really need them - how many of the phones are used for work, by people who lack passable alternative solutions or practices that can keep them from being literally unable to get their critical jobs done.
I do appreciate the effort spent to round up stats. What percentage of our economy do you suppose that totals to, and would the governement allow them to fail?
If you find that insulting I would understand.
[QUOTE=begbert2]
I do appreciate the effort spent to round up stats. What percentage of our economy do you suppose that totals to, and would the governement allow them to fail?
[/QUOTE]
I’m not even sure how to quantify it, since there are so many secondary manufacturing, production and development aspects. My WAG would be less than 10%, world wide…but that’s only a guess. The impact of even 10% to the worlds ecomomy (and it would hit some countries harder than others…look at the percentages of population to number of cell phones in some of the most technologically advanced countries.
As to the government allowing them to fail, I’m not really sure. I can’t see the government allowing, say, AT&T to fail…it’s too critical to the nation. On the other hand, it’s not like the government has unlimited funds, and if we are talking about the sorts of disruptions I think would happen, and the economic down turn I believe would also happen, it might be a matter of saving AT&T while letting, say, Apple sink or swim on it’s own. And, of course, ‘government’ varies from country to country…could China afford to (or react quickly enough) save all it’s wireless providers and invest in the kinds of land line based infrastructure they would need to get around the fact that they have nearly a billion cell phones in use? Could Japan and South Korea do the same? How about Europe? Africa? Australia? I really have no idea, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it would be worse in many of those countries than here, and that they would have an even harder time adapting or keeping their vital companies afloat while they figure out how to work around the problem.
As another anecdote, when I was in India in the 90’s their land line phone system basically sucked big time. They were building a lot of trunking, but they seemed to be orienting more on wireless/cellular systems as a next generation leap forward. Assuming that is still the case (or even more so than when I was there), they would be VERY heavily dependent on cellular systems today than we are…and I’m not sure if they could easily restructure or keep their providers afloat to do so. I’m not sure, for instance, if the AT&T equivalent in India (Airtel, IIRC) would be able to survive the loss of so much revenue so quickly…and if not, what they would do to solve the issues and problems of trying to run land lines everywhere they might need them.
-XT
I’m not even sure how to quantify it, since there are so many secondary manufacturing, production and development aspects. My WAG would be less than 10%, world wide…but that’s only a guess. The impact of even 10% to the worlds ecomomy (and it would hit some countries harder than others…look at the percentages of population to number of cell phones in some of the most technologically advanced countries.
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I intended the question to be specifically about the percentage of the economy that is tied up in the business of actually making and servicing cell phones. As in cell phone makers, cell phone sellers, sell phone service providers: the ones who won’t be suffering the “employee efficiency hit” effect of losing their cell phones because they won’t have anything for the employees to do. Are we on the same page? I ask because I don’t see how the percentages of population to number of cell phones has much of anything to do with that, except to say that countries that don’t have cell phones at all probably don’t sell many of them.
Is that much of Apple tied up in cell phones now? Huh. I guess it might be.
I occurs to me to raise another point/ask another question: supposing that there are not critical efficiency problems elsewhere, but that cell phone companies that don’t provide land line or internet service are all allowed to fail, this obviously would not be a boon to the economy. But, how bad would it be? In my somewhat limited experience, not all economy shocks are created equal. The dot com bubble popping barely registered on my consciousness; Neither I nor anyone I know actually invested in anything that actually popped, and the stock market didn’t seem to suffer long term damage as far as I could tell. Whereas this housing thing took the economy down to the ground and has been kicking it repeatedly ever since.
Presuming for the sake of the hypothetical that the economy started in a relatively normal, non-recession state, how badly do you soppose the loss of the cell phone companies would effect the economy? Again, this is not including the effects of Steven-King-induced panic or general loss of efficiency; I’m curious about the effects of the cell phone companies along. With the economy as it is now, of course, a feather hitting it could do real damage, but how bad would this be if we weren’t already in a hole?
I think I’ve been conceding for a while that the effects would be worse in areas that never laid a full (or any) land line grid. Not that this changes the fact that the first stage of adaptation, the one that necessarily will only use already-available equipment, will continue apace; email really is the elephant in the room in this discussion, even though it wouldn’t be a 100% effective replacement for every task. (And don’t bother mentioning whether the computer systems use the cell grid or not; until we pick a specific method for this disaster to occur, the problem could be with the phones themselves and not effect the grid at all.)
Hmm, I wonder if there are any indian call centers that exclusively use cell phones for their employees? (That would seem counterintuitive to me due to the whole routing and monitoring aspect of it, but what the heck do I know?) If there were such call centers, they would be one of the (IMHO) very few companies that really would be completely SOL without alternatives or recourse if their cell phones went out - they wouldn’t be able to do anything until the replacement phone hardware was in place.
You are too late. I altered the course of world events over 30 years ago to begin the process of destruction. There was a slight slowing of progress in the 90s, but the process quickly self corrected, lost time was made up, and the process accelerated.
I do regret my actions, I was young and impetuous. Unfortunatly there is no way to stop the degradation. Sorry about any inconvenience.
[QUOTE=begbert2]
I intended the question to be specifically about the percentage of the economy that is tied up in the business of actually making and servicing cell phones.
[/QUOTE]
The best I could do is here. It looks like (in 2007 anyway), that direct cellular revenue (in the US) was $124 billion (well, $123 and change). It’s certainly higher today, and I’m not sure what all that counts…it’s simply listed as ‘O411USD: Revenue from mobile services USD’, which could mean it includes manufacturing and sales of cell phones, or merely entails revenue from mobile service contracts (i.e. your monthly cell phone or air card access). Considering the number of phones in the US (well over 200 million), I’d say that it probably is mostly the revenue for service (my own cell phone bill is over $100 a month, but my guess is the average for most of the 200 million+ is half that or less). BTW, you can look up the same information by country, to get a feel for how this global event would impact more than just the US.
The DRT companies. Well, I’d guess that the figure from the cite above will make a good baseline for the minimum losses in the US economy alone. Again, I’m not sure what all this figure encompasses (seems on the low end considering just the number of active phones and the high turn over of people buying new phones every year)…for instance, this figure probably doesn’t include peripherals or appliances that use a 3G/4G network (such as the iPad or related devices). It might not even include phone sales for all I know.
It is relevant because it shows you the scale of the problem. We aren’t talking about a couple thousand or even hundred of thousand people effected…not even a couple million. We are talking about something on the order of 91% of the population of the US being effected by this…not to mention a large percentage of the entire population of the world being effected. Over a billion active cell phones in China alone, and close to that number in India. Even if you take the caviler attitude that those folks will all just suck it up and carry on, consider what that means in terms of lost revenue alone. And that doesn’t even count all the other impacts I’ve been trying to explain to you…that’s just revenue that is instantly gone. That’s people who aren’t going to be paying their cellular and data bill next month, and won’t be buying a new phone (or two) this year. Do the math…if the average person pays just, say, $10 US per month for cellular service (which is wildly low…most countries pay MORE for cellular service than we do, and, as I said, in my own case cell service is over $100 a month for ONE of my phones) that’s $50 billion US lost per month!
And this, again, doesn’t include any other factors. It doesn’t include all the other secondary or tertiary companies impacted by those cellular service companies going out of business. Or impacts to the governments of the world having to prop up or bail out the critical service providers that need to be kept afloat. Doesn’t count the costs of that week or so while they have to rebuild their business flow in the face of the new reality, or the costs of upgrading or installing infrastructure to do the same thing.
Over a third of their revenue is from the iPhone. Not sure how the iPad would change this (they would probably have to give some sort of rebate or something for the 3G iPad’s, since it wouldn’t work anymore…they would still presumably be able to do WiFi, but the base model does that and the 3G version is the more expensive. Plus they get a percentage of the service contract I think, which is why they were exclusive with AT&T before).
No…it definitely wouldn’t boon. A lot of cellular companies have merged with land line providers, and my guess is that those business units would be cut loose to die, or they would try and fold them into some rebuilt model. Assuming that AT&T could be kept afloat after 40%+ of their business vanished overnight, my guess is this would be the route they would take.
Well, as you say, the dot com bust didn’t effect everyone equally. Certainly I can vouch that it was a bad time for me and my fellow IT folks. There were a lot of folks who were out of work, and jobs in the field were hard to find with tons of applicants for every job. We had a pretty nasty recession, and a lot of folks lost a lot in the market downturn. The difference is that it happened over time, and the entire industry didn’t suddenly go down never to rise again…a bubble simply burst and the market equalized on more realistic lines. It was painful, but it wasn’t anything like what would happen here. EVERY cellular company would suddenly find it’s stock worthless or at the least greatly reduced, their revenue suddenly and irrevocably gone, at least from the cellular side of the house. People who have contracts for X number of months service at $Y would refuse to pay (no cell phone service, after all), people with pre-paid service would want their money back, etc, so I imagine there would be lawsuits and even more chaos to add to the mix.
I can’t even think of an analogue that would work to compare what this would be like to some recession or depression that has happened in history. Nothing even comes close to comparing, since afaik nothing like this has ever happened…certainly not on a global level.
Well, just the ‘revenue from mobile services’ would mean a hit of $124 billion dollars annually from the US economy. Couple that with the inevitable stock market downturn, as all those companies lose the majority (or all) of their market value, and you are probably talking…what? $500 billion? A trillion? I suppose that it would be somewhere in that range, when you start factoring in bailouts, unemployment and such. And this is without a panic…I think that’s a good ball park. For the US alone. When you start factoring in what the effects will be in other countries, and how their own stock markets plunging would effect ours (and vice versa), I’d say…well, it’s too much for me to predict. And this would be if we weren’t already in the hole we are in today.
Could we recover? Damned if I know. I assume we could, eventually…it would just be a VERY bad recession or even a depression, with high unemployment and even more national debt, a period of lower productivity pretty much across the board for business and government alike, and a period of rebuilding.
I doubt that most India call centers are wireless. The trouble, at least when I was there last, was that most Indian HOMES weren’t wired…they were using a lot of wireless there instead of attempting to install a lot of building infrastructure. So, assuming that’s still the case, it would hit their populace much harder than ours, since most US homes have at least one POT’s line.
The other problem in India is keeping their own communications vendors solvent, in order to build past the problem…and the sudden and large loss of revenue and market value from their own cellular providers, manufacturers and developers. The trouble, again, is that you have a whole cascade of problems, so while you are trying to fix the one you have others impacting you. While you are trying to build new wired infrastructure and change your business models and process flows you are also going bankrupt, to put it simply.
-XT
I think there would be several hundred or thousand deaths due to the inability to reach emergency services.I know that all of our drilling rigs have gotten rid of their radios and use mobile phones for all of their emergency contacts and I know we typically have several lifeflights a week in this area. Without those at least two guys I work with would have died in the last two years.
In the time it would take to reequip all of the vehicles with radios since there would be a shortage of them on store shelves it wouldn’t surprise me if oilfield deaths increased significantly.
The best I could do is here. It looks like (in 2007 anyway), that direct cellular revenue (in the US) was $124 billion (well, $123 and change). It’s certainly higher today, and I’m not sure what all that counts…it’s simply listed as ‘O411USD: Revenue from mobile services USD’, which could mean it includes manufacturing and sales of cell phones, or merely entails revenue from mobile service contracts (i.e. your monthly cell phone or air card access). Considering the number of phones in the US (well over 200 million), I’d say that it probably is mostly the revenue for service (my own cell phone bill is over $100 a month, but my guess is the average for most of the 200 million+ is half that or less). BTW, you can look up the same information by country, to get a feel for how this global event would impact more than just the US.
The DRT companies. Well, I’d guess that the figure from the cite above will make a good baseline for the minimum losses in the US economy alone. Again, I’m not sure what all this figure encompasses (seems on the low end considering just the number of active phones and the high turn over of people buying new phones every year)…for instance, this figure probably doesn’t include peripherals or appliances that use a 3G/4G network (such as the iPad or related devices). It might not even include phone sales for all I know.
It is relevant because it shows you the scale of the problem. We aren’t talking about a couple thousand or even hundred of thousand people effected…not even a couple million. We are talking about something on the order of 91% of the population of the US being effected by this…not to mention a large percentage of the entire population of the world being effected. Over a billion active cell phones in China alone, and close to that number in India. Even if you take the caviler attitude that those folks will all just suck it up and carry on, consider what that means in terms of lost revenue alone. And that doesn’t even count all the other impacts I’ve been trying to explain to you…that’s just revenue that is instantly gone. That’s people who aren’t going to be paying their cellular and data bill next month, and won’t be buying a new phone (or two) this year. Do the math…if the average person pays just, say, $10 US per month for cellular service (which is wildly low…most countries pay MORE for cellular service than we do, and, as I said, in my own case cell service is over $100 a month for ONE of my phones) that’s $50 billion US lost per month!
And this, again, doesn’t include any other factors. It doesn’t include all the other secondary or tertiary companies impacted by those cellular service companies going out of business. Or impacts to the governments of the world having to prop up or bail out the critical service providers that need to be kept afloat. Doesn’t count the costs of that week or so while they have to rebuild their business flow in the face of the new reality, or the costs of upgrading or installing infrastructure to do the same thing.
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So with a nominal GDP of around $14 trillion in 2007, that would be about… a ninth of a percent of the total? Just to have the facts on the table.
You seem to be presuming that nobody is going to purchase any other phone plans with the money currently spent on cell phones. That is, that none of the people whose cell phones would get their land line services turned on.
Admittedly, there would not be as much income from land lines, because land lines are cheaper (though they might become a bit less cheap when demand ceilings), but it does suggest that these values you present are (to be polite) upper estimates on the long-term effect to the economy, with a high probabilty that the actual effects would be, to some degree, lower.
I’m seeing this a lot from you in this thread; your arguments tend to assume that when the cell phones go, nothing is going to flow into the crater their departure has created.
Most likely - what else could the possibly do?
To some degree this might be mitigated by folding the prior cell phone plans into new land line plans, in the case of companies that serve both. So while there would doubtlessly be lost revenue and a goodly number of badly broken contracts, it might not be ALL the revenue or ALL the contracts.
Actually this was without the period of lower productivity pretty much across the board for business and government alike, which I maintain is not a realistic projection given the existence of alternatives. And speaking of alternatives, contract conversion to land lines or other programs could in theory keep most of the providers at least afloat, possibly with the help of short/medium term government loans, in which case the (overstated) 124 billion lost wouldn’t turn to 500, the stock markets could recover somewhat as the land line/other alternatives stock jump, and the teetering tower of civilization could stabilize upright again. If not quite as high, at least not at the very bottom.
Of course, I suppose it could still fail, but a prediction that explictly assumes that no alternatives will fill in the hole fails to convince me that it will.
Does it matter if the population is hit with the loss of cell phones? At all? Economically speaking, I mean. If anything, that will just galvanize them towards seeking alternatives - again assuming they’re not just running around like chikens with their heads cut off in blind panic.
It is certainly possible that the communication vendors in any country might go under due to temporary loss of resources and revenue - particularly if the government is unable to prop them up during the infrastructure work that some countries will be in dire need of, far more than we in the states will. And if enough dominoes fall, then so goes the world. But as usual I see reasons to believe your projections are based in unrealistic pessimism.
I feel like begbert2 is constantly assuming that every single person who is involved in these scenarios acts in a sober and rational fashion.
“Something mysterious has happened that we don’t understand that seems like it might cripple massive sectors of the economy, and I can’t get hold of my wife to make sure the kids are OK. Well, better start carefully planning out a conversion process to backscale us to using VOIP and landlines… Granted, we need cash to pay our expenses for the next week. Fortunately the banks are continuing to extend lines of credit because they are confident that things will turn around quickly…”
[QUOTE=begbert2]
So with a nominal GDP of around $14 trillion in 2007, that would be about… a ninth of a percent of the total? Just to have the facts on the table.
[/QUOTE]
Except that’s not ALL the facts…it’s merely one stat that shows revenue…it doesn’t show the value of the companies involved, or the effect of all of those companies stock values dropping some non-zero amount, or the secondary effects of those companies dropping having on other companies, and the non-zero hit they would take, and so on. Nor cost of any other disruption.
My cell service is with Verizon. Suddenly it stops working. I’m not going to pay them to continue to provide a non-service…in fact, I’m going to be asking them to refund me some money.
Even if your service is with AT&T, you aren’t going to do some sort of swap…they aren’t going to throw in a new land line to replace your cell phone. In the short term they are going to take something like a 40% hit to their total revenue…not counting whatever hit they take to the value of their company on the stock market.
Well, I’m not sure what WOULD ‘flow into the crater’ to be honest. Oh, I see that there will be an increase in POT’s or other types of land lines, probably a huge increase in various radio solutions (traditional voice radio and expansion of WiFi to encompass metropolitan area networks and then expanding from there), but none of these things would be quick, easy solutions…they would take time and a lot of money. And they would take shifts in production, plus development in technologies that don’t scale today to meet our needs or are considered ‘old school’ (such as traditional non-digitized radio).
So, while eventually capital and production will ‘flow’ into this ‘crater’, it’s not something that is going to happen in a couple of weeks…or months…maybe not even years. It will take that long just to get back on our collective feet, and build a new infrastructure and process.
Fold, I would assume. They are probably one of those companies ‘too big to fail’, so maybe folding isn’t an option for them.
I’d say that, initially, they would certainly lose all those contracts and revenue…plus all that nasty lawsuit stuff. In the long run, they probably WOULD recover some of that revenue using land lines, or maybe newly developed radio/WiFi systems that they would deploy and sell down the road (that would magically work even though cell phones don’t ;)). But they aren’t going to be selling many people on getting a land line to replace their cell phone initially…not in the US. For instance, I HAVE a POTs line at my house…I don’t need another one, and putting in another one wouldn’t really replace the service I’ve just lost. At work, we wouldn’t be putting in any sort of POTs lines at all…we’d be putting in VoIP, once we managed to procure the necessary equipment.
But let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that the phone company did say they would be willing to put in the lines we need to replace our cell phones…how would they scale that offer? They would be replacing some large percentage of that 200+ million cell phones with POT’s lines. They don’t have the technicians, they don’t have the hardware…and they would be doing this in the face of at least an initial large reduction in their revenue. How do you foresee their ability to do this? And until they do it, they won’t be replacing that revenue, right?
How would the stock market recover in the short or medium term? Even if companies like AT&T DID offer to replace cell phones with land lines, and even if they bust ass to develop and deploy some alternative, it’s going to take time…time in which their stock price will continue to be low. It’s not like they will instantly start to bounce back…right? And how about the effect of our market going down initially and it’s effect on other stock markets around the world…and vice versa?
Sure it matters. Even taking out the blind panic aspect (which, frankly, I don’t believe you could reasonably take out), it’s going to have a large effect. Even in India people need to call each other, to call for emergency or other public services…even more so when there is an ongoing crisis. Sure, eventually they could and probably would wire all those places with land lines (or use a new voice radio/WiFi type system that would almost certainly be developed after something like this happened), but it would take time, and in the interim there would be a lot of disruptions and problems. And they would only add to the costs of that ‘ninth of a percent’.
The trouble is that most of the worlds economies are interconnected these days. If the US economy gets a cold then all the world coughs, and all that. And vice versa…if India’s economy goes suddenly tits up, it’s going to have a non-zero impact on the US, Europe, Asia, etc. And the same goes for Europe…and Asia. There would be no way for us to simply unhook our economy from the world and isolate ourselves…besides, we’d be having the same problems ourselves.
I’m not saying the entire world would go down, though I concede that it’s possible. I’m saying that it would be a heavy blow and one that would take more than a couple weeks for us to get past. I’m actually becoming more pessimistic about this the more I think about all of the permutations, and the more I see how big the scale is (I had no idea that there were over 4 and a half billion cell phones IN USE, world wide…my god!).
ETA: BTW, I found this article that discusses the average cell phone bill in the US…I was wrong. It was $63 per month for basic and $77 per month ‘for more intensive use’ (presumably full data access)…and that was in 2008. Just a little tidbit, not anything specifically asked for.
-XT
I already conceded, repeatedly, that if everyone goes insane with panic we’ll be eating each other within a week. What more do you want?
Except that’s not ALL the facts…it’s merely one stat that shows revenue…it doesn’t show the value of the companies involved, or the effect of all of those companies stock values dropping some non-zero amount, or the secondary effects of those companies dropping having on other companies, and the non-zero hit they would take, and so on. Nor cost of any other disruption.
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And thus because (unlike you) I didn’t state all the facts, we natually must assume that the world explodes. Yes, yes.
My land line is with Verizon. Would you pay them to provide you with land-line service, to the land line that you say is already physically running to your house?
Yes? Then you don’t need to do anything but procure a plug-in phone. (Presumably somebody nearby just set themselves on fire and jumped out a window; maybe you can take theirs.)
No? Why not?
Do you live in India or something? Most of the US is already wired. When you speak of “infrastructure”, you are, in many cases, referring to simply purchasing a telephone.
Yes, yes, supplies of non-cell phones will be dear for a while. Years?
Okay, door number 3. Though I suspect that even the “small enough to fail” companies will make at least a token effort to limp along if they have any non-cell services they offer.
What happened to all of the land lines that are already in place? AGAIN you assume that every cell phone has nothing whatsoever in place to even begin replacing it with.
I think you’re fantasizing a world where no phone lines currently exist, so I can’t assume that your predictions are too reasonable on this front.
However, I also must concede that the stock market is, inherently, irrational. If people think that it ought to go down and stay down, it undoubtedly will in a literal self-fulfilling prophecy. There’s therefore no possible way to argue against your apocolyptic vision. I give up on this front.
What ongoing crisis? Remember the discussion: the cell phones are gone. The absence of cell phones is not going to cause earthquakes and volcanoes. The US economy tanked recently; did people call the police and fire department as a result?
Do try not to get swept up in your apocolyptic vision; it’s feeding back and ruining your signal.
Oh, and 911 would have a web page and e-mail address in 48 hours. Or 12. The specifics of its use will be broadcast on TV. Incidentally.
I guarantee you that a hefty percentage of those cell phones are almost completely superfluous - if a single house has four cell phones, they do not need four land lines to replace them. Not that this will allay your fears.
And I already said that if enough dominos fall, the rest will follow, and next thing you know we will all be eating our own children. It all depends on how bad things get, en total. (Though assuming nobody nukes anybody, the countries that have land lines in place will recover much more quickly. Well, give or take those that instantly switch to e-mail instead.)
I feel like that’s a bit of a false dichotomy. Certainly if we assume the worst possible panic, then everything will fall apart. But I’m not talking about the worst possible panic (ie, people instantly reverting to cannibalism and breaking into sporting goods stores to get the guns). I’m talking about people making unwise decisions in stressful situations, and financial institutions being cautious, and people operating without having all the information available to them, and so forth.
As an example, let’s discuss the financial stability of one of these cell phone companies. Now, it may well be the case that if Verizon lost all of its cell phone business tomorrow, it in fact has enough other oars in the water that it ought to be able to survive the crisis, albeit not without some pain. BUT, there’s a very real extent to which any company is only as stable as people believe it to be. (We usually discuss this about banks, obviously, but it’s also true of corporations in general.) Maybe a sober analysis would indicate that Verizon is going to be just fine, and people should continue to own its stock, lend it money, etc. BUT, are people really going to be making sober analyses? And are people going to trust everyone ELSE to make sober analyses? Etc. That’s the kind of panic I’m talking about. Not full on run-around-and-flail craziness, but snowballing small decisions made without time to fully assess the situation. And of course it doesn’t apply strictly to Verizon, but to any company that does business with Verizon, and on and on.
[QUOTE=begbert2]
I already conceded, repeatedly, that if everyone goes insane with panic we’ll be eating each other within a week. What more do you want?
[/QUOTE]
Well, for my own part, I just want you to put the bunny back in the box…
sigh WHY couldn’t he just put the bunny back in the box??
You were the one trying to make the point that it was only ‘a ninth of a percent of the total’…I’m merely pointing out that this figure was only the tip of the iceberg. To paraphrase from Star Wars, let’s try and stay on target here.
And what’s your expectation for them to turn up new service to your house when they lose something like 70% of their business overnight? You do realize that turning up a new phone in your house is not done by magic elves, correct? That it involves provisioning the local switch to tie your houses infrastructure (those wire thingies) into their system and set up a phone number and billing and such…right? Not to mention if you have older wiring there is a physical aspect as well (those pairs of wires in the box on the side of your house…the ones with the screws?). How well do you think Verizon is going to be able to accomplish this not only when it’s taken an immediate and rather large hit to it’s cash flow, but also laboring under trying to change it’s process flow (i.e. the way it sends those meat puppets out to work on YOUR land line), the hit it’s almost surly taking on the stock market, plus possible high demand from all the other Verizon customers to do similar things? See, they don’t get cash flow until AFTER they turn up your new line, you use it, and then they bill you. No worries when it’s just you and a few thousand of your neighbors daily, and they have techs they can send into the field with cell phones and pagers…a bit more of an issue when they suddenly have a lot more demand, are struggling financially, plus have to have those meat puppets tied to telephones or constantly looking for some place to check their email (I know…email is the solution to all the worlds woes). I’m thinking you will probably be waiting for that new land line to get turned up for, oh, at least a couple weeks or so (I’m kidding of course…you might grow old and gray before you get that new line, since you aren’t exactly going to be a high priority for them initially).
sigh Have you ever gotten a new phone line installed in your house? Do you think you can just plug in a new phone and that gives you a new line??
Because it doesn’t work that way?
Did you miss the part where I said that most US homes have POTs lines? Or that I was talking ABOUT India there? Or that I was making the point that, you know, not all countries are the US? That while we’ll have one set of problems, other countries (like, oh, say India?) will have different problems? I concede I didn’t make this next part crystal clear, but I’ll do so now…the US isn’t an island unto itself. What happens in other countries (like, I’m thinking…I’m thinking…I’m thhhhiiiiinnnnkkkiiiinnnnggg…say, India?) effects us here in the US as well, and will have a substantial impact on our own economy. Just like our financial woes in something like this will effect them. That whole connected thingy…it can be SO inconvenient sometimes.
Yes…years. But I’m not going to bother explaining business 101 anymore. For one thing I’m obviously not very good at it (this is a VAST understatement). If you don’t think it will be years that’s fine by me.
How? With the lost of a large percentage of their revenue, with (assuming they are publicly traded) their stock valuations in the tank, with (I assume) banks being unwilling or unable to loan them money, how will they just limp along? It’s a serious question.
The land lines in place will, of course, be used. I was responding to your assertion that cellular companies would have the ability to replace their revenue streams by replacing cellular phone service with land lines as a sort of swap thingy or something of that nature. It was YOUR assertion…I was merely responding to it.
I guess I should have just said something like ‘the short answer is that you are dreaming if you think cellular companies will be able to replace lost revenue streams by installing new land lines…not happening, at least not on any of the time scales you seem to think this non-crisis would realistically be on’. It would have saved me a lot of typing.
No, I’m trying to inject a bit of realism into the discussion. If you don’t want to accept that, again, I’m fine with that.
Fine by me.
But the economy only tanked to a certain point. Critical services weren’t effected. The crisis wasn’t at all mysterious (like this one would be…hell, it would have even physicists and engineers stumped as to how ONLY cellular networks would be effected, but radio and other transmission medium weren’t). In the housing bust, it was simply a bubble that popped…prices had been artificially cranked up, the market adjusted. Painful, but nothing we haven’t seen before. THIS, however, would be something entirely different…an entire industry, a whole technology sector would basically go away overnight. Billions in revenue…in RECURRING revenue…poof. Over night. WORLD WIDE.
I’d say that ‘crisis’ is a pretty accurate description of what would happen initially. Again, if you don’t want to believe that, it’s fine with me.
Well, I fired up WireShark and even put a volt meter on my forehead, and I’m not seeing any substantial feed back. 
Sure they would. And the government would be telling everyone that everything is ok, don’t panic, stay in your homes…we are here to help! I’m sure that would do the trick. Plus, as you say, we’ll have email…better than loaves and fishes and stuff!
Well…if you guarantee it and all, then I have to accept that. You are right…4 cell phones doesn’t equate to 4 land lines. Cell phones are ‘force multipliers’, to steal a term from the military. 4 land lines wouldn’t replace the 4 cell phones…nor would anyone try to do that. Again, I was responding to your digression about cellular companies replacing lost revenue by giving customers new land lines (and then presumably using that for new revenue streams…or something).
It doesn’t allay (I like ‘alloy’ better, since it has a much more metallic ring to it) my fears…or add to them.
I’m sure that email will indeed be the key. Besides, I haven’t enjoyed Domino’s since I was in college…their pizza just isn’t what it used to be. I really liked the the Noid…I was bummed when they got rid of him. 
Anyway, I’m enjoying the discussion. I think that MaxTheVool is saying all this stuff better than I am, so I’ll leave it to him, at least for the evening and probably the weekend, though I might check in if something interesting comes up, or if there is something else you want to discuss on this subject. If not, hope you have a good weekend. 
-XT
Surely you jest.
I do…I’m rarely serious. I did used to like their pizza when I was in college, however. 
-XT
Many people have abandoned their land lines and only have cell phones as a communication option; the loss of cell phone service would leave them with no emergency communication service and they would have to fall back onto running next door or something to get emergency assistance if needed.
It is true that many emergency response agencies now use cell phones (or data services delivered by the cellular communications network) are a primary or secondary part of their communications strategy. These agencies would have to fall back onto other technologies, and some would have reduced communication capacity as a result.
However, the thing that strikes me with this scenario is the probability of a complete loss of cell phone service without comcomitant losses elsewhere is very low. There are a plethora of cell phone carriers, so a system fault at, say, Verizon, is unlikely to affect AT&T, at least not without affecting landline service as well. Something that takes out a single cell tower, or a bunch of cell towers, will only impact those towers; and as cell towers are often colocated with other wireless services such as pagers or public safety radio, something that does do this is likely to have a concomitant impact on alternative communication options.
An obvious way to impact cell service in a wide area is a large scale power outage; we saw this in Kentucky with the ice storm that cut power to a big part of the state; the cell service cut out once the fuel in the backup generators ran dry, but the power outage also affected land lines, long distance, and other radio service communications as well because all of these rely on some form of power generation.
The telephone network is remarkably robust, and it would be very difficult to cause wide-scale failures in the telephone network other than by perhaps finding and exploiting a (heretofore) unknown vulnerability in the PSTN switching systems causing a widespread failure of the entire PSTN, landlines and cell phones alike. And even this wouldn’t take out cellular data services or internet-based telephony systems.
I suppose a massive solar storm could cause widespread radio outages including cell phone service, but that would have other consequences, including taking out all forms of wireless communication, including public service radio, broadcast radio and television, wireless Internet, and also probably causing widespread power outages. But most of the scenarios that cause widespread cellular outages are associated either with widespread power outages or large scale wind damage (blowing down towers), in which the cellular outage is a consequence of a much broader disaster.
Complain to the OP. Without his insistence on this unlikely scenario, I’d be on XTs side of global catastrophe. You know, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!
The world would become a much better place. That would be the big difference.