Comment Re:Cell phones are better in a disaster (Score 1) 582
Wrong. Cellphones and cell networks are reliant on centralized nodes like RNC's, HLRs & MSC switches to setup calls and these are almost always overloaded during natural disasters. Carriers are only willing to spend enough to cover a single node failure, otherwise known as an N+1 redundancy model. With this model, a natural disaster affecting a geographical area with high population density (lets say a 'big one' earthquake in SoCal) the volume of calls that are triggered, which is vastly non-emergency "Hey Mom are you OK?" type traffic, is usually enough to prevent even 911 calls completing for an entire cell network (nationwide outage). You can experience this phenomenon each year on Dec 31st at 11:59pm when SMSCs are consistently overloaded with "Happy New Year Bob!" SMS messages. Dont for a second think that your cell phone is going to save you in any large scale emergency situation such as this.