Your Survival Blog
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
E.T. Phone Home—If You Can!
A neighbor and I have a friendly argument about phone service. He long ago switched to cell phones as his primary method of voice communication, but since he and his wife have a school-aged son, they keep a house phone for “family” calls. Their house phone, though, is not a hardwired land line (the old-fashioned Ma Bell kind) — it’s a VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) service. Which lasts only until the power or cable go out, I point out. (While the Internet itself is pretty robust and can route information around major outages, the “last-mile” connections, especially cable service to homes, can be vulnerable to squirrels, heavy rain, and other minor glitches.)
Me, I’ll give up Ma Bell when you rip her out of my cold dead hands. See, I used to live in the town the electric company forgot, and on days the electricity went out to lunch, or a long vacation, the phone was the only thing in the house that worked.
(Note that if you’re a Luddite like me and think land lines are the bee’s knees, you need to make sure that at least one of the handsets in your home is the kind you plug only into the phone jack, and is NOT a cordless or other handset dependent on an AC outlet. Relatives of mine found this out the hard way.)
God bless self-powered phone lines, I tell my neighbor. Will your beloved cell function several days into an ice storm?
“If it’s ‘several days’ into an ice storm,” he fires back, “and I have had zero power, then my house is already unlivable. And I would have moved somewhere else.” (Which, I have to admit because we live in the Northeastern United States, is a point. But admitting that might lose me face.)
At this point in the argument another neighbor generally steps in and offers to go out with an axe, hack through the ice, collect rocks, use the rocks to build a fireplace in his house, make a turbine from old bike parts and install it in the chimney, generate his own electricity, and invite Neighbor Number One over to recharge his cell phone. My neighbors think they’re comedians.
Now I’ll confess that I own (and love) a cell phone; I bought it for use outside my home, but it’s also backup should land-line service go kablooey. I think everyone (especially those responsible for children or other dependents) should consider having at least two methods of communication in an emergency.
Yes, naturally there are ways to recharge cell service if your power is out: if you have a car charger, you can run your car for a bit and recharge from engine power, and if you’re running vital services in your home or office from a generator, you can borrow power from that. But if cell was my primary (or only) phone service, I’d go out and buy a wind-up emergency cell charger, solar charger, or supplemental battery unit. I’ll address some of these options in a future column.
Friends who work in the communications business — and this is by no means a scientific survey — speculate that in the event of a widespread disaster in our area, land lines will be restored first, then cell towers, then (long afterward) last-mile broadband. Your area may have different priorities (and, if they’re wrong, so could mine).
Here’s a rough overview of the pros and cons of each communication method:
land lines (Plain Ol’ Telephone Service)
Pros: Powered by phone company batteries, so they work for a while in a widespread power outage (at least a few hours, maybe even days). Work best with 911 service, as responders can tell exactly where you are.
Cons: Overhead lines susceptible to windstorms, ice storms, and ground movement.
cell phones
Pros: Portable; can be used almost anywhere there’s a signal from a cell tower service (including most of the US and Canada). Many newer cell phones have GPS, allowing you to be pinpointed by emergency responders. SMS text messages (because of the minimal bandwidth they require) may be the only thing that get through in a widespread disaster. Cell towers may survive disasters that take out telephone lines.
Cons: Batteries have short lives; recharging during an outage can be a challenge.
VoIP
Pros: Can be used wherever there’s an Ethernet connection. Often cheaper than the other methods.
Cons: Vulnerable to both power outages and outages of your cable service or Internet service provider. Guests in your home may not understand how to use your service. If you use your VoIP service for mobility, Caller ID may not tell emergency services where you really are.
Worth chewing over, isn’t it, as you prepare for the most likely disasters in your region?
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