Cellular communications: Difference between revisions

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.

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>.  

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.rnz.co.nz/news/national/485259/why-nz-s-communications-networks-broke-down-in-cyclone-gabrielle</ref>.

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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