Cell phone tower and disasters

Cell towers are easier to replace, and in many places they're fed by buried fiber.

COWs are also a drop-in replacement once the roads are clear, and we have several flavors including...flying COWs.
When COWs Fly: AT&T sending LTE signals from drones
AT&T Networks Prepared for Hurricane Irma

You have to wait for roads to be cleared (in all types of disasters) but the restoration speed and flexibility benefits for wireless is fairly clear.

 

How interesting!

 

How long can they stay up?

 

From the first link:

Here’s how it works. The drone we tested carries a small cell and antennas. It’s connected to the ground by a thin tether. The tether between the drone and the ground provides a highly secure data connection via fiber and supplies power to the Flying COW, which allows for unlimited flight time. The Flying COW then uses satellite to transport texts, calls, and data.

 

Yup, the one sentence I missed was the one I asked about. Thanks!

 

they'll never go back to land lines.

 

Down here where Hurricane Harvey made first landfall, getting cell towers back up and running was just as an important priority as electricity. It appeared from my limited knowledge that the crews put up a "new" cell on a surviving tower rather than try to repair the original equipment. It also looked like they used a chain saw to cut all the old cables going up the tower! LOL I suspect it was much faster and easier to build a new cell rather than try to troubleshoot a bunch of wind/water damaged equipment.

 

Nor should they.

Candles and oil lamps still work as effectively as they once did, and each are still used in some cases but one does not consider them to be a primary lighting source.
I say this as a Central Office weenie.
I'm the guy that manufacturers the dial-tone that you hear when you pick up a landline fed phone......if you can still find one.

1970's telephony had some pretty powerful advantages.
It was fairly cheap.
It was reliable as heck.
There was NO DOUBT about whose responsibility it was to fix ANY problem with your phone from your handset to the other handset.

The only one teeny-weensy little problem was that the system was kinda inflexible......something that humans tend to grow discordant with from time to time. We now have all of the freedoms of deregulation!!!
However (comma!!!)
That freedom also extends somewhat to the provider.....

One basic problem with landline phones is the 'last mile.'
Even in modern neighborhoods with buried services, wildfires can cause problems with Mark-1, Mod-0 landline phones since there are always facilities like SLC huts and cabinets, pedestals and cross boxes that can be wind damaged by fire, flooding, wind, gunfire....or just plain age.
Cellular can either eliminate all of that, or augment it...and it's somewhat future-proof at the user end.

Back at the end of World War Twice, we tried to use surplus bombers (B-29's if memory serves) trailing antennae to do broadcast TV into the growing suburbs. That was rapidly supplanted by cable, and additional terrestrial wireless and.....now increasingly, by satellites.

People can still watch TV in their living rooms but now thanks to modernity, and for better or worse, they can watch "I LOVE LUCY" reruns at other times and in other places......

 

Cell phone service is a competitive product in the US.
Except for technical requirements for their operation, there generally are NO requirements for reliability or sustainability.
Maybe it is time (past time) to fix that.
What they do now is........NOTHING. Wait for the overload to pass usually.

Of course small insignificant things like this that affect the daily lives of almost every person in the country are not important to the politicians......who spend most of their time lately trying to make each other look bad. And that's kind of like shooting fish in a barrel.

 

Good luck with that!

Personally, I'd LOVE to have the job security......

 

I just don't think landlines are the Holy Grail of emergency contact.

Landlines can go down or be overwhelmed just like any other system. I firmly remember the Loma Prieta earthquake and how phones didn't work afterwards for days. Even when it did come back up, we kept getting the all circuits are busy message.

Landlines are not portable. If I am hurt working on my Prius and can't move. The corded phone in the kitchen is much farther away from me than the cell phone in my pocket.

And the landline has to be an old fashioned corded phone right? Because the point of it as an emergency is to not require electricity. So no using cordless phones.

What's the advantage of landlines? They pinpoint you to your address if you can't speak. My cell phone pinpoints me to within a radius of 3 meters. I want them to start in the garage and not waste time in the backyard looking for me. With E911, you can add an address to your cell number anyway.

I understand adding landlines as another form of emergency contact. What about a CB radio? Satellite phone? VOIP phone? Another cell phone from a different carrier? Install a wifi cell signal repeater?

 

......drums, smoke, semaphore, telegraphy.........

Fun Fact:
The telegraph is credited for being the first device to make use of electricity, and Western Union was formed out of the various companies to commercialize this product for rapid, long distance communication. It became THE giant such company of its day (mid 1800's) killing off the then fledgling Pony Express.
When Alexander Graham Bell first [sic] invented the telephone, he offered to sell the patent to Western Union for $100,000 which was quite a considerable sum. Bell at the time was trying to trying to multiplex several morse signals onto one wire (acoustic or harmonic telegraphy) which would have been worth VERY MUCH in that day, and he was trying to get operating capital.
The good folks at Western Electric basically threw him out claiming that it was a commercially useless product.
If you think about it IN CONTEXT, it's not without merit.
Telegraphers can key much faster than people can talk, and there's a written record of the communications......both of which are quite advantageous in a business environment constrained by a wired world.

Eventually, of course the humble telephone patent would go on to earn more money (some said in the 90s) than perhaps all other patents combined, and Western Union would go on to be a subsidiary to AT&T....after court fights and skirmishes involving the inventive giants of the day....most noteably Edison who "had a vacuum where his conscience ought to be" and in a decision (not the last) that would be reached by the Supreme Court of the US.


Humans, you see are sometimes 'change averse......'

 

Speaking of communications.....

-duplicate post.

Sorry

 

maybe it's the era i grew up in, but up until we finally ditched the copper last year, it was always up, when cable and cell were down.
of course, they kept raising the price every year to drive people off of them and it worked. can cells be made that reliable? i hope so.
it was nice to have both, but too expensive.

 

Place the transmitters in orbit and, as Bob Wilson would say, power them by a fusion reactor.....

 

Already been done.
I'm pretty sure that there is still one or two companies providing satellite phone service.
VERY expensive, however.
And in a severe disaster, you still have to worry about charging the battery in your "handset".

 

Power the handsets with the same reactor.