[Tanada]

The latest situation with Hurricane Sandy reminds us once again that the old fashioned traditional hard wired phone your parents and grandparents used is more robust in a disaster than the cell phone network. Most people today carry a cell phone, I know I sure do and just about everyone I know does as well. I don't even have a home phone any longer, though because of the reminder from Sandy I am considering restarting phone service on a hard wire to my house.

Those people whose homes or businesses were not totally destroyed by the latest disaster were still able to communicate via phone even when their electricity was not working. It turns out the old fashioned hard wired systems are extremely robust and reliable in circumstances that shut down a large number of cell towers and leave cell phone users incommunicado.

Depending on how things play out, for example if blackouts become frequent in the post peak world, keeping your cell working will be much more difficult than keeping your hard wired phone working in terms of technical difficulties.

[lowem]

All the years I've signed up with my ISP, they've offered free telephone service with the cable modem service and later the same when upgrading to fiber. And I've always turned that down, thank you very much, and stuck to POTS, the plain old telephone service which I pay for separately. It's not that costly, just a few dollars a month and it gives me the assurance that I've still got some communications if the power goes out or the cell towers go down.

[Keith_McClary]

Of course, be sure to have a corded phone that will work in a power failure.

I've read that cable or fibre phone services may have a backup battery in the modem that lasts a few hours.

[PeakOiler]

Today I bought my very first cell phone. No plan, just a pay as you go thing. Now I have to learn how to use it. It's just a basic "dumb" phone. Shouldn't be that hard...

Because of the age of my 2003 Honda Insight, and the fact that it has over 210,000 miles on it, I thought it would be a good idea to get a cell phone for emergency use since I still have a long commute for the next 31 months. (That's right, 31 months till retirement! ) I'll keep the phone in the car. Public phones are getting rarer and rarer. If the car broke down along the highway out in the country, I would have been SOL.

I still have a land line for my little house in the country, but I recently bought a wireless modem for the computer which frees up the home phone. There is no cable for an internet connection out here in the country, and I didn't want to have to get a satellite dish and a bundle of TV/phone/internet crap that I didn't really need. I rarely watch TV anyway. I still only get broadcast TV. Dial up internet was just too slow.

[autonomous]

Same deal in the 2003 blackout. The POTS pay phones continued to work for several days whereas the cell towers lasted only a few hours. Cell towers have tiny backup batteries, but the POTS system has massive battery banks in secure facilities.

The most reliable communication setup I used was a satellite modem with VOIP telephony powered by an off grid solar system.

[Quinny]

I used to be a member of the local county council emergency defence committee. The underground bunker that would have been seat of government if a major disaster struck seemed a real heath robinson affair, with ancient handsets with wind-up power in the actuall handset. It was explained at the time that the minimal electronic parts and the fact they were normally powered down made them less likely to be damaged by an EMP, but also made them much more resilient.

It was also interesting how the emergency defence team had lots of networks with voluntary organisations that dated back to pre WWII and reckoned that bodies like the WI would be an essential part of post disaster food distribution etc.

[PeakOiler]

I'm using my 36 watt solar PV panel/100 amp-hr storage battery/1 kW inverter to charge the battery for my new cell phone. A solar powered cell phone. Not so bad. Perhaps I should also get a backup battery for the damn thing.