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Cellular communications: Difference between revisions
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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>. | 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>. In the 2023 Cyclone Gabrielle hit the North Island of New Zealand 10s of 1000s of people uncontactable due to communications infrastructure being without power, and whose battery fallback only lasted a few hours and where due to the remote location of the infrastructure it was not possible to supply power via transported diesel generators<ref>https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/cyclone-gabrielle-broke-vital-communication-links-when-people-needed-them-most-what-happened-and-how-do-we-fix-it/22NDWWPKMZEKDIQWCP6566X2UQ/</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). | 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 | Sometimes however, even in cases cellular communications are available, or have been partially restored, internet access itself is not available via mobile data routing. This is due to the 'backhaul' connections being broken or impaired. In both Haiti's 2010 earthquake and Eastern Japan's 2011 earthquake, submarine cables were severely damaged, 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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