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Cellular communications: Difference between revisions
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Added section Failure of cellular infrastructure in disasters
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At the current time there are two dominant cellular communications systems in use: CDMA (used primarily throughout the United States, South Korea and Japan) and GSM, which is used everywhere else, also including some parts of the United States. | At the current time there are two dominant cellular communications systems in use: CDMA (used primarily throughout the United States, South Korea and Japan) and GSM, which is used everywhere else, also including some parts of the United States. | ||
== Use of cellular infrastructure in disasters == | |||
As mobile phone adoption has rapidly increased, so has cellular communications infrastructure spread. In many parts of the developed world cell sites provide coverage across the majority of the landscape, whereas in economically poorer regions mobile data increasingly acts as the sole means of internet access in urban and rural areas. | |||
Due to this broad use, cellular communications are increasingly used as a broadcast medium for alerting as to a coming extreme environmental event. Further, during the preparation phase, the event phase and aftermath, cellular phones are often used to organise, stay in touch with loved ones and to give location and status updates to rescue teams. The use of realtime video and the sharing of photos and voice messages has proved vital for rescue efforts across many disaster events. | |||
== Failure of cellular infrastructure in disasters == | |||
Cellular infrastructure has a long history of failing civilians when needed most. In some cases it has been due to infrastructure itself being damaged, whereas in others the network has been overloaded to the point of becoming unusable. When extreme events result in the disruption or blackout of communications systems, uncertainty and anxiety is often amplified hampering relief efforts<ref>https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1550147719829960M</ref>. | |||
Three causes of cellular communications failure<ref>https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6103680</ref><ref>Menon VG, Pathrose JP, Priya J. Ensuring reliable communication in disaster recovery operations with reliable routing technique. Mob Inf Syst 2016; 2016: 9141329.</ref>: | |||
* Destruction of CS components | |||
* Damage of supporting infrastructure | |||
* Congestion | |||
Hurricane Katrina (2004) saw communication infrastructure broadly damaged, resulting in challenges for thousands of victims and many first response teams<ref>https://www.cse.wustl.edu/%E2%88%BCjain/cse574-14/ftp/disaster/index.html</ref>, whereas in the Fukashima disaster of 2011, the network became almost immediately overloaded and unusable. In this latter case, untrained and unprepared taxi drivers quickly came to the aid using traditional in-vehicle CB transceivers to relay information and coordinate relief efforts. In the 2010 Haiti earthquake, radio again played a mission-critical role where cellular networking failed due to damage and/or overloading<ref>http://www.aidforum.org/topics/mobile-for-development/the-use-of-mobiles-in-disasters/</ref>. | |||
Where radio is used, status updates and information relaying rely on language comprehension parity, and so in some cases human translators, and also lack the benefit of images and video to provide status information. Further, rarely are victims of disasters carrying 2-way radios like walkie-talkies or personal locator beacons (PLBs). | |||
Sometimes however, even in cases cellular communications are available, or have been partially restored, internet access itself is not available via mobile data routing. In both Haiti's 2010 earthquake and Eastern Japan's 2011 earthquake, submarine cables were severed or destroyed, effectively cutting off large populations from the Internet<ref>https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1550147719829960#table1-1550147719829960</ref>. This serves as an example where the use of Internet-dependent remote 3rd party applications or services on phones is not always to be relied upon. | |||
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