4 ms·

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 netwo

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).

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).