With the current global unrest, your 5th favorite mod and tech geek wanted to take a quick minute to remind everyone about emergency comms for the common citizen.
If the terrorists were to act locally (not likely), or even if there was a natural disaster, you can pretty much guarantee communications are going to be CRAY CRAY. EVERYBODY is going to be jumping on their cell phones trying to phone loved ones, 911, etc. Which will cripple the system. I experienced this firsthand one day where there were 10-20x as many people as normal around a small town interstate exit full of fast food joints during a huge event at lunch time. We couldnt make phone calls or send iMessage based texts between our two parties because the towers were overwhelmed. The iMessage texts literally didnt go through until we were 10 miles down the road where the towers were not overwhelmed.
So if something does happen that doesn't knock the cell system down entirely, turn off MMS/iMessage on your android/iphone and force your phone to use true SMS texting. If you do that. you are more likely to be able to communicate. In theory, when running ONLY SMS, as long as you have at least 1 bar of service, you can exchange SMS messages. They may be slow on an overwhelmed tower, but slow is better than nothing.
MMS/iMessage uses the fat internet/data/voice channel to communicate, but SMS doesnt. So if you cant place a voice call or use data, you cant send/receive a MMS/iMessage message either. (pictures, videos, etc)
Pure SMS uses a narrow sideband channel that is primarily used for administrative signalling between the tower and the phone. (tower connections, roaming, call handoff to the next tower, etc) That is why the SMS text limit is 144 characters; That is the amount of data that is transmitted per packet on that channel. So in between administrative packets, it can send a SMS text message packet instead.
And now we return you to your regularly scheduled INGO feed.
Stay safe everybody.
If the terrorists were to act locally (not likely), or even if there was a natural disaster, you can pretty much guarantee communications are going to be CRAY CRAY. EVERYBODY is going to be jumping on their cell phones trying to phone loved ones, 911, etc. Which will cripple the system. I experienced this firsthand one day where there were 10-20x as many people as normal around a small town interstate exit full of fast food joints during a huge event at lunch time. We couldnt make phone calls or send iMessage based texts between our two parties because the towers were overwhelmed. The iMessage texts literally didnt go through until we were 10 miles down the road where the towers were not overwhelmed.
So if something does happen that doesn't knock the cell system down entirely, turn off MMS/iMessage on your android/iphone and force your phone to use true SMS texting. If you do that. you are more likely to be able to communicate. In theory, when running ONLY SMS, as long as you have at least 1 bar of service, you can exchange SMS messages. They may be slow on an overwhelmed tower, but slow is better than nothing.
MMS/iMessage uses the fat internet/data/voice channel to communicate, but SMS doesnt. So if you cant place a voice call or use data, you cant send/receive a MMS/iMessage message either. (pictures, videos, etc)
Pure SMS uses a narrow sideband channel that is primarily used for administrative signalling between the tower and the phone. (tower connections, roaming, call handoff to the next tower, etc) That is why the SMS text limit is 144 characters; That is the amount of data that is transmitted per packet on that channel. So in between administrative packets, it can send a SMS text message packet instead.
And now we return you to your regularly scheduled INGO feed.
Stay safe everybody.
