Re: Telecom Collapse?

* Marshall Eubanks · * Fri Dec 05 09:22:12 2008

On Dec 5, 2008, at 9:01 AM, David Cantrell wrote:
On Thu, Dec 04, 2008 at 11:08:49AM -0600, Jack Bates wrote:
911 services are heavily used when a geographical area has an
emergency,

and that emergency usually includes not having power.

Yes, and it usually involves several thousand people all phoning to

report the same damned thing, clogging up the emergency service's
lines

so that *other* emergencies (like, say, someone having a heart attack)

don't get dealt with.
Unless you live in a natural disaster prone location.

So don't do that. It's really rather silly.
I've always thought that people who choose to live on flood plains
or on

the side of active volcanos etc are at least a little bit crazy. Of

course, if they're so poor that they don't have any choice
(Bangladesh,

perhaps) then they can't afford the non-existent POTS infrastructure

anyway - but someone in the village might have a mobile.

There is literarily no place on the planet that is safe from natural
disaster.

It's just that the recurrence times differ, and can be rather long in
places, giving

an illusion of safety. For example, for the recent tsunami in

Indonesia, India and Sri Lanka, the recurrence time is estimated to be
~1000 years.

Most people would think that they do not have to worry about a once
per 1000 year

danger, until the water starts entering the second story.
Regards
Marshall

                                                      Or if your
grandmother's alert bracelet requires a phone line for notification.

That's no reason for almost anyone to have a POTS line, because almost
everyone doesn't live with their grandmother, and almost all
grandmothers don't have alert bracelets.
--
David Cantrell | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david
comparative and superlative explained:
<Huhn> worse, worser, worsest, worsted, wasted