4 ms·

Right, but radio is considerably more scalable than cell phone towers. Cell phone networks congest in a manner which radio cannot. And when natural disasters

Right, but radio is considerably more scalable than cell phone towers. Cell phone networks congest in a manner which radio cannot. And when natural disasters occur, you end up with two things compound to incapacitate cell networks. First damaging physical infrastructure, and second a spike in demand. With cell phone towers out of the network, the increased load is left to whatever remaining towers are available to carry the increase. A crowd can accidentally DDoS a cell phone network. They can't DDoS a radio station.

adventured 14y ago
Sure, and maniacs can cut the guy-wires on radio towers, I've seen it happen on more than one occasion over the last 20 years. With radio - regarding natural disasters - you typically have at most one tower per frequency. Often networks will combine their broadcasts onto one tower, aka one point of failure. There's nothing special that keeps a natural disaster from taking that tower out, versus a cell tower. The counter argument is that cell towers tend to be highly distributed and numerous - even in a bad scenario, drive 5 minutes and you'll probably get another cell tower, and then another, and then another (partially true for radio, but you're going to jump stations doing that, and the Internet will remain up even if you can't access it at one specific tower, ie cnn.com remains up in an earthquake or blizzard). Most radio stations are small to medium operations, even those owned by Clear Channel (they operate locally, mostly on their own budget, and have local equipment). So regardless of if eg Clear Channel owns the station in question, if you pack enough ice onto its tower, the hardware on it is going to be damaged, ditto for wind. For mom & pop stations, of which there are a huge number, the cost and infrastructure difficulties under that scenario are terrible.
- knowtheory 14y ago
  Right, i'm not claiming that radio towers are impregnable. I would still argue that they've got a better track record for fault tolerance than cell phone networks, which are also limited in reach to begin with. Also regardless of major natural disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina, there are piles of smaller less predictable phenomena, such as tornados, flooding, blizzards, and wild fires for which radio is a more effective medium for reaching people. There's still no suitable equivalent for the emergency broadcast system for cell phones, and even if there was, I'd be hesitant to stake my life on it in non-urban areas across the US (which is, lets face it, a big part of the country).
  - adventured 14y ago
    I would agree that radio towers do have a much better record, but there's a reason for that: cell towers use a distributed model that allows for a higher individual tower failure rate, radio towers use a single tower point of failure model. So there was never any other choice for radio towers but to maximize uptime, otherwise there's no radio business the last 60 years. And the cell tower business is a whole lot younger than the radio tower business. Time is eroding the uptime edge radio has possessed as cell towers proliferate and get better. And regarding local disasters. I always thought local events / local news / local weather etc would be the saving grace for most radio stations, the competitive advantage that Pandora could never take away. I no longer believe that to be the case so much. The threat is more Facebook, and other services, than Pandora. As people are all now connected on Facebook, and constantly share local news and events. I believe that may nuke the radio business the same way Craigslist nuked newspapers on classifieds (and not just Facebook, it's one example of a trend in new ways to distribute local events).
- hluska 14y ago
  That was a great comment and I'm sorry to latch onto one detail, but people actually intentionally cut guy-wires???? I'm hardly ever rendered speechless, but that's just too baffling for words...
  - adventured 14y ago
    Yeah it happens occasionally (it's rare on an individual tower basis mind you, but I know of several instances over 20 to 25 years in the mid east coast region). And for every time it actually happens, there's two or three times more threats from some crazy person that they're going to do it. This kind of stuff seems to have increasingly died down over the last 15 years (I assume due to radio losing its center of focus, radio isn't as local as it used to be now that almost everybody uses services like JACK FM or Dial Global or the former Westwood One etc etc). Towers are often isolated, a long distance from people (ideally at high'ish elevations of course). So someone with a grudge, maniacs, whatever, can pretty easily sneak up to most towers and cut a guy wire. It's not difficult to topple most radio towers. And it's not very difficult to get away with it, given the isolated nature of most towers; you're also not going to likely kill anybody doing it (except maybe yourself).
    - mikeash 14y ago
      How much money is involved in repairing or replacing the tower and the equipment on it when something like that happens? It sounds like an expensive hit to take, but I don't have a good concept of what this stuff costs.

adventured 14y ago

Sure, and maniacs can cut the guy-wires on radio towers, I've seen it happen on more than one occasion over the last 20 years. With radio - regarding natural disasters - you typically have at most one tower per frequency. Often networks will combine their broadcasts onto one tower, aka one point of failure. There's nothing special that keeps a natural disaster from taking that tower out, versus a cell tower. The counter argument is that cell towers tend to be highly distributed and numerous - even in a bad scenario, drive 5 minutes and you'll probably get another cell tower, and then another, and then another (partially true for radio, but you're going to jump stations doing that, and the Internet will remain up even if you can't access it at one specific tower, ie cnn.com remains up in an earthquake or blizzard). Most radio stations are small to medium operations, even those owned by Clear Channel (they operate locally, mostly on their own budget, and have local equipment). So regardless of if eg Clear Channel owns the station in question, if you pack enough ice onto its tower, the hardware on it is going to be damaged, ditto for wind. For mom & pop stations, of which there are a huge number, the cost and infrastructure difficulties under that scenario are terrible.

knowtheory 14y ago
Right, i'm not claiming that radio towers are impregnable. I would still argue that they've got a better track record for fault tolerance than cell phone networks, which are also limited in reach to begin with. Also regardless of major natural disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina, there are piles of smaller less predictable phenomena, such as tornados, flooding, blizzards, and wild fires for which radio is a more effective medium for reaching people. There's still no suitable equivalent for the emergency broadcast system for cell phones, and even if there was, I'd be hesitant to stake my life on it in non-urban areas across the US (which is, lets face it, a big part of the country).
- adventured 14y ago
  I would agree that radio towers do have a much better record, but there's a reason for that: cell towers use a distributed model that allows for a higher individual tower failure rate, radio towers use a single tower point of failure model. So there was never any other choice for radio towers but to maximize uptime, otherwise there's no radio business the last 60 years. And the cell tower business is a whole lot younger than the radio tower business. Time is eroding the uptime edge radio has possessed as cell towers proliferate and get better. And regarding local disasters. I always thought local events / local news / local weather etc would be the saving grace for most radio stations, the competitive advantage that Pandora could never take away. I no longer believe that to be the case so much. The threat is more Facebook, and other services, than Pandora. As people are all now connected on Facebook, and constantly share local news and events. I believe that may nuke the radio business the same way Craigslist nuked newspapers on classifieds (and not just Facebook, it's one example of a trend in new ways to distribute local events).
hluska 14y ago
That was a great comment and I'm sorry to latch onto one detail, but people actually intentionally cut guy-wires???? I'm hardly ever rendered speechless, but that's just too baffling for words...
- adventured 14y ago
  Yeah it happens occasionally (it's rare on an individual tower basis mind you, but I know of several instances over 20 to 25 years in the mid east coast region). And for every time it actually happens, there's two or three times more threats from some crazy person that they're going to do it. This kind of stuff seems to have increasingly died down over the last 15 years (I assume due to radio losing its center of focus, radio isn't as local as it used to be now that almost everybody uses services like JACK FM or Dial Global or the former Westwood One etc etc). Towers are often isolated, a long distance from people (ideally at high'ish elevations of course). So someone with a grudge, maniacs, whatever, can pretty easily sneak up to most towers and cut a guy wire. It's not difficult to topple most radio towers. And it's not very difficult to get away with it, given the isolated nature of most towers; you're also not going to likely kill anybody doing it (except maybe yourself).
  - mikeash 14y ago
    How much money is involved in repairing or replacing the tower and the equipment on it when something like that happens? It sounds like an expensive hit to take, but I don't have a good concept of what this stuff costs.