Cellular communications: Difference between revisions

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>.