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Comment by kriro | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how smooth the switch will be (the article says cars are a big problem due to the price). I'd imagine quite a few people won't upgrade their car radio and you'd think...so what radio is way to retro let's just stream stuff and listen to mp3s/ogg.

I don't know if owning a radio is legally required in Norway but if it isn't I can see the radio ownership going down. Once again you may ask so what?

The biggest issue (for me) is that radio plays an essential part in crisis management. Imagine a long term power outage or some other crisis. With radios it's mostly a matter of keeping stations running and making sure the population knows that a battery powered (or crank powered) radio such as a car radio will work during a power outage. That's one of the few reliable ways of mass-communicating important information during power outages.

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It would be cheaper to develop a system for mass-SMS in a crisis and publicize it than to keep FM/DAB running, and I bet the delivery rate of the crisis message would be an order of magnitude higher.

Many municipalities already have that in place (for sending out alerts about water quality etc).

The problem with cell towers is that the infrastructure is more brittle with more moving parts. There's been cases where fires, power outages etc in small towns have caused base stations to go offline, cutting whole towns off from communication.

Not to mention the recent case where penetration testing done by another operator in Europe accidentally caused the entire cell phone network of the largest operator in Norway to go offline for half a day.

If you know the inner workings of the cell phone network, you can't help wonder how it still works so relatively reliable.

Not if the crisis involves mains power outage - cell towers don't generally have backup power so mobile phones will be useless.

Edit: Adding generators/batteries to a significant fraction of cell towers is (probably) impractical due to them being bulky, expensive, and attractive to thieves.

This is not correct in the case of Norway, at least - I believe (mind, believe, I do not know for sure) that telcos are mandated by law to have emergency power supplies available; whenever we have a massive power outage, cell service stays up for hours, if not days afterwards.

Them being bulky is a major deterrent to theft, as a lot of our cellphone infrastructure is way out in the boonies and not really accessible unless you REALLY want to get to it...

It isn't the Telcos I think about in this situation.

It is my own phone batter. Or my spouse's - he has a dying phone with a dying battery, which doesn't always like to hold a charge. I'll be good for a while, sure, but once I'm dead... I'm dead. If something would happen late at night, after I've fiddled with my phone all day, I might start out with very little power. Early in the day, and I could make it last most the weekend.

Ah, that figures. Mea culpa. In that case, a $20 power bank should provide at least a couple of full charges - but if you're anything like me, you'll forget to top it up at regular intervals and will find that its capacity is greatly reduced when you need it... :-/ (I cheat; I have a small diesel generator for use during outages - we're typically without utility power a couple of days every winter.

Still, any solution based around a smartphone is going to be subpar, compared to the dirt-cheap FM receiver that can run for weeks or months on a couple of ubiquitous AA batteries.

If I understand correctly, all cell towers in the US are in fact supposed to have at least 8 hours of backup power.

Here's the FCC ruling: http://www.njslom.org/FCC-07-177A1.pdf (page 23)

Maybe one could just keep one emergency channel using an analog signal and make sure everyone owns a receiver (they are dirt cheap anyway).

Then you wouldn't be able to shut down any of the repeaters.

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