Mobiles not supported by NTC?

[BoxGranch]

I just spotted that most of my power supplies were taken off life support as well.

I had taken a hiatus from watching this thread, but based on my experience in the field and directing people in the field in 2004 and 2005 covering hurricanes, the cellular and landline networks took heavy hits and were not reliable. Satcomm was what saved my day, especially the first BGAN's I got in time for Katrina and Rita. Oddly, VZW did stay solid in New Orleans for Katrina which was a big help as we were heavy users of cellular data, but there was a lot of area impacted outside of NO. I am sure there were other areas that were fine, but even locations that were not badly damaged found systems badly overloaded by evacuees. I know there is a lot more mobile infrastructure today, but counting in cellular for the first few days after a major storm is not wise in my view. Satcomm offers the best bet.

[Eclipse]

CAP had satcomm in Katrina and it was largely useless as the satellites were saturated with all the agencies that thought they could rely on them.

It's also way too expensive for any general distribution.

[BoxGranch]

I had no trouble with Globalstar and Inmarsat BGAN through multiple storms. I never said it was practical for CAP. The biggest issue I had was trying to make people understand they don't work indoors and you can't walk about bobbing your head as the antennas need to be pointed at the sky when using a handheld. That's not an issue with a BGAN, of course.

What provider was CAP using? I would guess Iridium. We used Globalstar for voice up to about 2008 and switched to Iridium when Globalstar's amplifiers on the birds began crapping out. They have replaced all of the birds now, so that's where I would go if I were in the market. CAP may not have had much priority on Iridium. I consistently saw FEMA people getting through on Iridiums with ease, but some of the state and local people complained about not getting through. My vendors indicated that Iridium could and did prioritize who they were told to prioritize, so it might not always be accessible to many users. As a non-governmental userhat's why I always preferred Globalstar . I also liked the architecture better for my purposes, though Iridium has a much better footprint. Voice quality was better on Globalstar although the newer Iridium headsets must have had better codecs as they were a lot better than the first ones.

[Eclipse]

Most likely Iridium, but I don't know for sure.

Most of the CAP sat phones only existed because they were part of the old SDIS packages which
some then decided would look cooler be more missionready in their homes.

Like most CAP advanced technology initiatives, this seemed like a good idea at the time.

[BoxGranch]

Satcomm is great to have, but too pricey for most of us, alas. I still have a personal Gstar, but can't justify keeping it on the air. If it really looked like the big one was going to hit here and there was time, I would get some prepaid minutes, but it would be for family safety.

In the early days with Gen 2 cellular, a cool feature of the original Gstar handhelds was being able to use them on landbased VZW and Gstar. As landbased left that technology behind, you could no long activate it on VZW. I still think they ought to put out one with modern chips you could use it for landbased or cellular. It was nice to only have to carry one of the stupid things. A lot of times I was carrying six on different carriers plus the satphones. You could almost always get through on somebody's network. These days I guess you only need three plus the satphones.

Elon Musk's Starlink is going to be very interesting and might put a lot of other players into a hard spot, assuming the tin hat folks and astronomers don't stop it. I'm not seeing pricing yet and wonder about latency, but it could be a game changer.