Happy New Year everyone!!!!
I am presently in Waukegan Illinois and last night at midnite when the New Year was struck at midnite, I tried to call my kids on my cell phone and they were trying to call me. The system was locked completely up and it took 15 minutes to get through to me and several minutes of trying after that to get ahold of anybody else!!!! Even then the call quality was questionable.
Can you imagine what it would be like if a National Emergency was to take place? What would be the first thing most folks would go for? The cell phone, naturally!!!! I consider this event to be a bow shot warning us to be prepared to use other methods of communications. As Preppers and radio operators, we need to have those batteries charged and a family frequency established so we can at least have a shot of communicating with each other. Just some New Years Day thoughts!!!!!
out
K7DLB
Friday, January 1, 2010
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I used to work in the Telecom field. We used to dread May 10th. Why May 10th? It was Mexican Mother's day. They do not "force" their Mother's day onto a Sunday down there.
ReplyDeleteWe used to max out switches all the time and who ever had the dreaded pager that day was in trouble.
One time the entire SNET SS7 (Signal System 7) that runs the A-link signaling for all the major phone companies went south due to saturation.
These are the links that provide all the connection and tear-down information for nearly all long-distance calls for most major carriers.
This told me two things.
One.. Man! that is heck of a lot of calls, the amount of Mexican's now calling the US home is probably higher than most people are estimating.
And
Two.. Our communications are probably a little more susceptible to major disruptions due to any large disaster than most people realize.
I have seen it over and over. During 9-11 there were many "outages" to cell service. During Katrina it was the same thing. During the big wind-storms in the PNW a couple years ago we saw it again. I most recently heard of outages during the Fort Hood incident. I was listening to the Police-Scanner (compliments of Internet streaming) when one of the units had to ask dispatch to make a phone call for him because the cellular system was saturated and not accepting calls.
I do have a couple of tips (besides using ham radio) for those that need to get a call or message out during an outage.
The first is try a text message. There is less much less overhead with text message. In just one or two digital packets the message can get out even when new calls are not being accepted.
The second, try your VOIP line. I know during the PNW wind-storms and flooding some folks were still able to call over the VOIP lines while cell and land-lines were saturated. Obviously this mean you must still have connectivity with your ISP.
Anyway, I for one found DLB's information interesting and another confirmation to what I know to be true.
N7JVC