Maybe Emcomms has a point?

Yesterday morning, I decided to do battle with local bureaucracy on the phone.  I had some documents to be certified, and all was not going according to plan.

Curiously, when I dialled the number on my mobile phone, it was cut off immediately.  The signal strength meter was showing an empty symbol.  All very unusual, as outages of the mobile phone service are extremely rare.

Later in the day, with any SMS message being sent about three times to a recipient, it emerged that O2, a major mobile network provider and other-services carrier in the UK, had suffered a big problem with its packet switching software, reportedly provided by Ericsson.  The problem wasn't resolved until the early hours of this morning.

O2 fails, big time.  Image: WikiCommons/Wally Reardon

Now, I am the first to be quite dismissive of 'emcomms' organisations who advance the view that amateur radio can somehow save civilisation from catastrophe.  For one thing, those kinds of organisations are too often populated by people who like to wear fluorescent jackets and give the appearance of being authority figures.

Though I make no comment or imputation about the individual in this specific image, the overall appearance is indicative of what I find objectionable about emcomms people:

No, this is not a policeman...

That all said, there is a flip side.  Local authorities in the UK used to work in reasonably close cooperation with Raynet and their ilk in the past.  Over recent years, this cooperation has faded away.  One emergency planning officer at a local council even told me that authorities had been instructed by central government not to bother staying in touch with amateur radio emcomms people any more.  One of the reasons for this was that "everybody has a mobile phone now", heavily implying that the kind of total failure O2 suffered for the best part of a day yesterday could never happen.

The failure of mobile networks is perhaps rare, but not unknown.  Several US cities hit by hurricanes and floods have suffered outages in recent years, including a protracted failure in Florida in October.

As many news outlets covered yesterday, the increasing volume of calls and data being handled by these mobile networks has pushed for ever-greater complexity in the software used.   Also of concern, beyond technical failures, is the increasing involvement of foreign companies, notably Huawei, in UK communications infrastructure.  And then there is the Russian government, currently on an aggressive mission to probe and disrupt UK interests; just on my doorstep, Russian submarines are being monitored by AWACS and other systems in the Irish Sea on a regular basis.

So there is plenty of scope for things to go wrong, and perhaps go wrong in more and different ways into the near future.  As it happens, this morning sees a violent storm hit the northern half of the UK, which will likely increase demand on the mobile network - if it is available.

Now, amateur radio is no solution to people's en-masse calls and messages when the main systems fail.  But for essential, emergency communications, maybe local authorities would do well to come round to the view, as I have, that amateur radio could in fact provide a very useful, no-cost emergency communications backup.  Certainly, they should not turn their back on what is potentially available.