I have been thinking about how to communicate without power. My son uses a DANA for school. This thing has ability to connect to internet. It seems like a great thing as it runs for hours and hours on batteries. It runs Palm™ OS Software v4.1 and has been described as a really big handheld—it has keyboard (so you could not put it in your pocket:o) I believe it runs about $400 so it is better deal than a laptop. I will see if I can find the review that described it but you can find out more about it at alphasmart—the other units don’t go on line—only the Dana.
okay, here is link www.alphasmart.com/products/dana
If the power is down for any length of time, the internet will also be down.
You won’t have anybody to communicate with, regardless of what device you are using.
dot net --- Not necessarily. There’s always generators and dial-up access, as well as battery adapters for automobiles to use with a laptop.
The ‘net won’t go down completely, although I feel there will be a major slowdown regarding access to particular websites.
If power goes down, the battey backup for the receivers that connect to the Web will eventually go down. I believe most sites are set up to run on battery power for a few hours, but not days.
Most of the central hubs, or ‘backbones’ of the Internet (8 or nine of them, I believe) will most likely ration their emergency generator times over several days, say to power the hubs and switches for 6 hours per day instead of 24. They know as well as everyone else that if the ‘net goes down, it’ll be he** getting things started back up again. Also, I don’t believe the power grid will completely shut down for long periods of time. There’s too much at stake for the gov’t to let that happen
During the power outages here in the NW from the windstorm we lost Comcast cable internet service. I had telephone and I was able to power up my computer with my generator but there was no cable internet service. My wife also lost her Sprint wireless service. I think my internet service came back online with the power. I didn’t check it until the next morning.
From what I understand the internet providers have different ways of providing service, I know Qwest uses dialer cabinets and they lose power when the neighborhood loses power. Your best bet during outage would probably be a dial-up service to a location outside of the power outage.
Cable head-ends are remotely powered from the local utility power. No provision for external generator power in any that I know of.
Same with metro-wide internet in a lot of cities. The repeaters are powered off of street light poles, with no provision for backup power.
The phone company central offices are good for 12hrs of battery power, and 3 days of generator power with fuel on hand.
The remote Dslams (fiber to the neighborhood) are also utility powered with provision for limited generator backup plug-in for “essential” areas. Not all areas will have coverage.
The MAE’s (MAE-East, MAE-West, Internap, PAIX, etc.) all have backup generator power for no more than 5 days with current fuel stocks.
Read about the ISP in New Orleans during the Hurricane that kept their service up, only to lose 2 of their 3 fiber lines because the Telco’s central office lost A/C and overheated equipment shutdown.
I would expect 90% internet loss to the general public within 10 days.
The government has it’s own system using hardened Verizon switching stations (they won the contract) and their own fuel supply for generator backup.
Fiber repeaters all require power, as does ALL of the “last mile” equipment.
The government backbone will stay up no matter what, probably at the expense of the civilian internet.
You will not be a priority.
I bought one of those little emergency radios - AM,FM, SW1 and 2 - that can be powered up with a hand crank or solar power. (my xmas present to me) It was cheap, and is not able to do anything but receive…but if there is a complete lockdown I can at least try for news updates that way as I SIP.
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Am going to stop at Walmarts, I have heard they have a cheap and dirty, AM-FM and weather station crankup radio on sale for 14.95. A good extra prep for news. I only use my car radio now, and rarely watch T.V. Get all my news via internet and skimming through newspapers. Evening T.V . news is a lot of nothing, almost worthless, a waste of time. I grew up listening to the radio in the background.
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I did not hear the whole story but there was a recent(12/26?) story on CNN about how the recent storms? in South Pacific snapped some underwater cables and put parts of the internet “offline”. Sorry to be so vague but maybe someone else recalls the incident.Until this discussion I obviously had not thought through “what is the internet” (besides something I yell at when I can’t sign on to because of slow service:o)
Yes, apparently storms or earthquake (I forget which) damaged some underwater or underground cables & took out the internet service and left a country basically without internet service. I think they were getting it back online now, but it’s been a few days. I’m being vague too, because I don’t remember all there was to the story! :-)
Post-Katrina the whole electrical grid was down here in south Mississippi (but almost miraculously restored by Miss. Power in 11 days). Local telephone service (BellSouth) somehow stayed up for the entire period. Long distance connections were next to impossible, however.
On a lark, I powered my DSL modem and wireless router with an inverter in my pickup. Shortly thereafter we had four notebook computers from the neighborhood gathering news and sending email to loved ones.
I don’t know how BellSouth maintained power for these services. I just know that it happened.
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In prior discussions on this forum (like a year ago, it had pretty much come down to that an extended outage of the grid over an extensive area would mean that the “normal” means of communication that folks depend on would be compromised or non-existant.
For gathering information about the world in general, an AM radio and a shortwave receiver would provide one with a means of at least passively gathering whatever information about the world in general, and perhaps their own district in particular, was available.
As a means of two-way communications both within their own local area, and with the rest of the country/world, it really came down to using amateur radio as the means of communication.
The ability to maintain operation of such equipment long-term also implied either solar, wind or water power to either operate the equipment directly, or else to charge batteries for later operation.
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