As you may have heard in the news today, many thousands of cell phone users did not have service today, on Verizon or phones trying to connect to a Verizon number.
A common issue with cell phones is that they require access to the local cell tower, a network service that may or may not be up at any given time. With ham radios you can use repeaters in a similar way (repeaters do go down fairly often too), or you can go device to device at the same frequency – the same idea as the walkie talkies and license-free FRS, or GMRS licensed radios that are quite common.
Mesh as a text based backup network
Another backup option to keep in contact that is fairly popular, is the mesh text system using either Meshtastic or Meshcore. These require specific hardware device like the Sensecap or similar – but do not require a ham radio license, and they can enable messaging across vast distances depending on how many local mesh devices are using it.
As we have seen in recent news, internet can go out for reasons related to government, accidents, or foreign attacks on the networks and it is good to be prepared!
Part of a larger pattern?
A couple months ago, it was reported that thousands of workers were laid off at Verizon. I wonder if a number of those were network engineers?
It was interesting to note that a major cloud outage at AWS web services happened after a large number of employees were laid off – they had also laid off thousands of workers in recent years.