4 ms·

Cell phones are laughable single points of failure. Everyone brought this upon themselves from decades of bad engineering choices, if you consider resilience a

Cell phones are laughable single points of failure. Everyone brought this upon themselves from decades of bad engineering choices, if you consider resilience an objective. Once upon a time there was a terrestrial network of small autonomous telephone exchanges. Your phone numbers were tied to geographical locations. It seemed 'inconvenient'. Now you or your signal often have to travel hundreds of miles (as the crow flies) to find a central office that is required for call completion, even between two phones 10 feet apart. Even so-called 'land line phones' are tied into this network now because cell phone providers have remade the old Bell system in their own image and require, of all things, Internet connectivity and utility power to boxes on poles all over the neighborhood to work. Expect it to fail all at once. You will not be disappointed. What this means in terms of the value of amateur radio is not hard to figure out.

gambler 8y ago
Thank you for posting this. > Now you or your signal often have to travel hundreds of miles (as the crow flies) to find a central office that is required for call completion, even between two phones 10 feet apart. And people generally think this is okay. Until something big happens and everyone reacts to it by trying to call other people, the central office gets overwhelmed, and the entire system stops working right when it's needed the most. Then you get something like AWS or Azure outage. And you see engineers saying "it's fine, there are so many services down, no one expects out to work". Then you get something like that big Oculus Rift shutdown. No big deal, right? But do you know that that some industrial control systems use certificate signing? I've just finished reading The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster. If you think about it, the kind of systemic failure he describes is not as ridiculous as it might sound. Over time, people start taking large technical systems for granted, like forces of nature.
- phaedrus 8y ago
  The Machine Stops was one of the first science fiction stories I ever read, and one I will never forget.
calebm 8y ago
This is one of the things that got me into ham. If cell phones and internet go down, most people can only communicate as far as they can yell.
- criddell 8y ago
  None of the other people I communicate with are hams, so if the grid goes away, I'm still pretty much limited to yelling.
  - scarecrowbob 8y ago
    I dunno... one part of ham radio is acting as a relay. If there are two groups of folks, and they each have a ham in them at least the groups can relay messages to each other.
    - criddell 8y ago
      There's a lot of ifs to all that. I think if I were going to do something to prepare for disaster, I'd have a big store of water and shelf-stable foods on hand first. I probably should do that...
      - scarecrowbob 8y ago
        Well, pragmatically, it only takes 2 folks with radios. Historically, there is a whole lot of prescident for it's functionality. By all means, though, having water and store-able food is an excellent thing to do regardless. Just anecdotally, having a radio and knowing how to use it is way higher on my list of personal prep than owning a firearm and knowing how to use it.
      - sean2 8y ago
        Well, yeah, communication is so far down on the priority of needs that my county's disaster preparedness pamphlets don't even mention it. But after we got hit with a hurricane it was pretty nifty to have ham radio friends who were able to exchange messages with hams near families in unaffected areas. I don't remember seeing any pragmatic uses for ham radio in that particular disaster, but those lines of communication was great for morale.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
WorldMaker 8y ago
Cell phones also have some of the greatest capacity to route around failure. Cell phone hardware includes extremely capable, software-controlled radio antennas. Just because they are currently slaved to specific communication patterns doesn't mean that they have to be. Mesh networking standards exist that can take good advantage of cell phone hardware. Several of the phone handset operating systems are already theoretically capable of supporting it (if they weren't so locked down). At the very least, in emergencies, cell phones should be able to network point-to-point between each other. The barriers to doing that currently today are more political and economic than technical. It would be great to try to tear those barriers down.
ant_li0n 8y ago
I know this post is a day old, so nobody probably will read it anymore, but I am still curious. All this stuff sounds interesting to me (buying and learning new equipment/techniques/etc) and I can see the possible benefits of emergency preparedness. But what I don't see is how this is really a viable hobby (for me). It seems like the daily practice of it is... boring. If I want to talk with people, I can use the internet. On the emergency preparedness front, hell, just buy a $50 handheld radio and learn how to use it, and throw the thing in a safe spot (along with the manual and extra batteries) and forget about it. What are the real payoffs as a hobby that you practice frequently, I mean. I don't mean to be dismissive. Amateur radio clearly has utility in specific circumstances, but I just don't understand why, after a day of browsing reddit and HN (and working!), I'd want to sit down to the radio and try and do the same thing with an antiquated piece of equipment. I mean, I'd love to be convinced. I love tech just as much as the next guy.
- barrow-rider 8y ago
  It is boring. I got into it because I did electronic warfare in the military. But it has its uses. Plenty of other stuff is boring and mostly useless, e.g. most of the raspberry pi stuff I've done. A $20 Google Chromecast or Roku is wayy less of a PITA than a rPi media center but I did it anyway to learn to hack it together. Same thing with a lot of radio stuff. And at like $30 bucks for a baofang and about a week or two of study for the technician license it's not a lot of cost or effort. So what would I do with it? Aside from a backup when hunting, just talkin w/ folks -- I'm in central Canada, so it's a far apart place with spotty internet access -- and I consider messing with radar tracking and even something more like a look-down-shoot-down style of radar, mostly as a hack to see if I can do it. Lot of demand for Radio Engineers if you want to do full-time cell phone or wifi stuff, too.

gambler 8y ago

Thank you for posting this. > Now you or your signal often have to travel hundreds of miles (as the crow flies) to find a central office that is required for call completion, even between two phones 10 feet apart. And people generally think this is okay. Until something big happens and everyone reacts to it by trying to call other people, the central office gets overwhelmed, and the entire system stops working right when it's needed the most. Then you get something like AWS or Azure outage. And you see engineers saying "it's fine, there are so many services down, no one expects out to work". Then you get something like that big Oculus Rift shutdown. No big deal, right? But do you know that that some industrial control systems use certificate signing? I've just finished reading The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster. If you think about it, the kind of systemic failure he describes is not as ridiculous as it might sound. Over time, people start taking large technical systems for granted, like forces of nature.

phaedrus 8y ago
The Machine Stops was one of the first science fiction stories I ever read, and one I will never forget.

calebm 8y ago

This is one of the things that got me into ham. If cell phones and internet go down, most people can only communicate as far as they can yell.

criddell 8y ago
None of the other people I communicate with are hams, so if the grid goes away, I'm still pretty much limited to yelling.
- scarecrowbob 8y ago
  I dunno... one part of ham radio is acting as a relay. If there are two groups of folks, and they each have a ham in them at least the groups can relay messages to each other.
  - criddell 8y ago
    There's a lot of ifs to all that. I think if I were going to do something to prepare for disaster, I'd have a big store of water and shelf-stable foods on hand first. I probably should do that...
    - scarecrowbob 8y ago
      Well, pragmatically, it only takes 2 folks with radios. Historically, there is a whole lot of prescident for it's functionality. By all means, though, having water and store-able food is an excellent thing to do regardless. Just anecdotally, having a radio and knowing how to use it is way higher on my list of personal prep than owning a firearm and knowing how to use it.
    - sean2 8y ago
      Well, yeah, communication is so far down on the priority of needs that my county's disaster preparedness pamphlets don't even mention it. But after we got hit with a hurricane it was pretty nifty to have ham radio friends who were able to exchange messages with hams near families in unaffected areas. I don't remember seeing any pragmatic uses for ham radio in that particular disaster, but those lines of communication was great for morale.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

WorldMaker 8y ago

Cell phones also have some of the greatest capacity to route around failure. Cell phone hardware includes extremely capable, software-controlled radio antennas. Just because they are currently slaved to specific communication patterns doesn't mean that they have to be. Mesh networking standards exist that can take good advantage of cell phone hardware. Several of the phone handset operating systems are already theoretically capable of supporting it (if they weren't so locked down). At the very least, in emergencies, cell phones should be able to network point-to-point between each other. The barriers to doing that currently today are more political and economic than technical. It would be great to try to tear those barriers down.

ant_li0n 8y ago

I know this post is a day old, so nobody probably will read it anymore, but I am still curious. All this stuff sounds interesting to me (buying and learning new equipment/techniques/etc) and I can see the possible benefits of emergency preparedness. But what I don't see is how this is really a viable hobby (for me). It seems like the daily practice of it is... boring. If I want to talk with people, I can use the internet. On the emergency preparedness front, hell, just buy a $50 handheld radio and learn how to use it, and throw the thing in a safe spot (along with the manual and extra batteries) and forget about it. What are the real payoffs as a hobby that you practice frequently, I mean. I don't mean to be dismissive. Amateur radio clearly has utility in specific circumstances, but I just don't understand why, after a day of browsing reddit and HN (and working!), I'd want to sit down to the radio and try and do the same thing with an antiquated piece of equipment. I mean, I'd love to be convinced. I love tech just as much as the next guy.

barrow-rider 8y ago
It is boring. I got into it because I did electronic warfare in the military. But it has its uses. Plenty of other stuff is boring and mostly useless, e.g. most of the raspberry pi stuff I've done. A $20 Google Chromecast or Roku is wayy less of a PITA than a rPi media center but I did it anyway to learn to hack it together. Same thing with a lot of radio stuff. And at like $30 bucks for a baofang and about a week or two of study for the technician license it's not a lot of cost or effort. So what would I do with it? Aside from a backup when hunting, just talkin w/ folks -- I'm in central Canada, so it's a far apart place with spotty internet access -- and I consider messing with radar tracking and even something more like a look-down-shoot-down style of radar, mostly as a hack to see if I can do it. Lot of demand for Radio Engineers if you want to do full-time cell phone or wifi stuff, too.