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Comment by dimal | Hacker News Reader

We’re dealing with this big time in Asheville now. When cell service came back at all, everyone had shitty intermittent 3G, and none of the websites we needed for basic survival information would load. A bunch of good people created some text only news sites, and today I noticed that the Buncombe county website finally has a low bandwidth site, but even then when I inspected it, it had 130k of bootstrap css and 50k of jQuery blocking rendering. It’s great that people are doing this work, but citizens needed this a week and a half ago. By now, I’ve figured out where to get water, food, non potable water, etc. Seeing tech fail so badly through all this has been eye opening for me, in a depressing way.

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Not as catastrophic, but during power outages in my neighborhood, I am usually left with a poor cell signal (no backups on cable internet boxes). Electric utility's outage map is hidden behind a login (!) and is rendered with fancy clustering and other UI features that are already slow even with a decent connection. So it takes quite a while to check the status or even report an outage.

I could call the utlity company, but for some reason, they chose voice navigation (instead of keypad tones) for their menu, and it is not good at recognizing distorted voice (over bad 4G or 2G connection).

The electric utility in my area is this bad and worse. I once reported a power outage when the power wasn’t actually out (explanation follows) and they had no way for me to cancel the report when I realized everything was fine. I tried calling but couldn’t get past an automated “we received your report and are working on it” message.

(Why would I report an outage when the power wasn’t out? Our lights blipped and my whole-home battery backup system kicked into action and showed a “grid outage” message. I checked it a few minutes later and it still showed the same status, so wanting to be a helpful neighbor, I reported it. I found out later that the battery backup system stays off-grid for five minutes following an outage of any length, even just a blip, I think as a debounce protection. When the utility trucks showed up, I told them what had happened and that their system wouldn’t let me cancel the report, but they were just glad to have a break from running around dealing with outages nearby, so they stayed and talked for a few minutes, curious about the battery system. Nice guys.)

Heh, similar issue once, only no battery backup and the main breaker would trip instantly. So, we had power, but it wasn't coming back up. After an expensive discovery that the issue wasn't on our side, the power company had to get into the junction box and discover that the wire had melted to the metal. We were 'this close' to losing everything due to a fire. Especially because once the metal cooled down enough, the power could come back on for a few hours.

> they chose voice navigation (instead of keypad tones) for their menu

Most voice menus have hidden, 1-indexed touchtone mappings.

The only time I've had an issue with using the keypad is during the prompt that goes something like, "In a few words, tell me what you're calling about."

Hitting zero repeatedly at that point is usually the only way through.

I was at the T-Mobile internet trucks in Asheville and the woman next to me was obviously stuck in some automated voice menu hell — you know when some one is sitting on the phone quietly listening to whatever the question “What can I help you with?” and then answering with one clear word. I saw her sitting there like that waiting, then respond clearly, “Disaster!” I’m going to guess the system didn’t have a way of handling that answer.

that situation has had me thinking about getting an amateur radio license again. In a disaster like what happened to Western NC, which encompasses a much greater area than just Asheville, I wouldn't want to rely on anything based on the Internet. You want something with a long wavelength and low power. But it's so inaccessible, and I'm not sure if it's for good reason or not.

Connectivity was knocked out from Black Mountain all the way to the Tennessee and Georgia borders. I'd be surprised if many people even have shitty 3G back yet. What I know is remaining in touch with people who live there has been hard.

You can listen without a license. I was able to hear everything on a $15 handheld and it was immensely helpful.

In an emergency you are allowed to transmit without a license. There were plenty of unlicensed calls going to the Mt. Mitchell repeater.

All that being said, I am definitely getting my license once this is over.

> You can listen without a license

You can also talk without a license, who's going to stop you? Especially in an emergency situation.

I don’t know anything about this topic, so forgive me if I’m wrong.

Would there be any risks associated with increased “free for all” amounts of radio traffic going around during a natural disaster like this? Couldn’t specific channels become cluttered to the point where signal is too disrupted to read, or is that not quite how it works?

I think there are thousands of frequencies. Traffic can split up into those.

What I want is for every smartphone to have an FM radio built in. There are FM radio IC chips available, and apparently some Android phones have them. It seems like a reasonable thing to require smartphones to have them for emergencies. I had to run my car in the beginning, burning precious gas just to hear on the radio what the hell was actually happening.

It might be selection bias, but my impression was that it is very hard to find a phone without this feature (going back to the Windows Phone and semi-smart feature phone era as well). The usual downside is that they do not spring to life unless a wired headphone is connected, because the cable is used as the antenna.

> unless a wired headphone is connected

aren't wired headphones increasingly unsupported in newer phones?

Yes, that is becoming a huge issue for me.

Indeed, most phones have the hardware already, but the radio isn't surfaced in the software.

Ah, yeah. I was wondering how it could work without an antenna. I guess an FM antenna needs to be larger than the 5G antenna built into phones too.

I owned a series of Moto Gs that could, but with the removal of headphone jacks I am not sure how much reception you could expect. I did manage to pick up FM stations without anything plugged in but only pretty close to a transmitter.

Some phones even used to have TV tuners in them, though I don't think any of them were sold in the US.

Back in Venezuela there we're at least 2 models of the Telepatria, A phone with TV Capabilities, if I recall correctly, both models being basically modified ZTE designs

The original model did come with an external anthena, and the latest model is from 2015, no anthena needed

Plain old AM/FM radios are cheap and super efficient. Everyone should have one! I have a portable radio that I use regularly and its AA batteries often last a few years!

CB is roughly 11m wavelength and doesn’t require a ton of power, and doesn’t require any licensing.

Do you have links to the text only news sites?

CNN is on https://lite.cnn.com/. The home page is a single 30KB HTML file (my browser also insists on downloading their 6KB favicon).

A thing of beauty, compared to their normal home page with 90+ files of 12MB.

Wow - that is the fastest loading site I've seen!

It's almost as if we all have supercomputers in our pockets which could easily handle text and images of only web devs didn't shove 10MB of code in an interpreted language every time time we open a page!

Half of the people on this site are those very same webdevs.

Which means pointing it out has a higher potential for bearing fruit. If we convince just one web dev to start thinking/caring about it, that's a win.

What's up with that?

Why would you rather build SUVs for soccer moms than race cars?

yup. I marveled at a cray y-mp 4 back in the days. now I use one as my daily driver, compute power wise. mind. blown. come to think about it...

No, you don't.

You use something some 200 to 2000 times more powerful.

https://greycoder.com/a-list-of-text-only-new-sites/

http://frogfind.com/ Might be useful

Yeah, I should have posted that. This is the one I use the most:

https://text.bpr.org/

I forgot to save the links to the others.

Wow it's amazing how noticeably faster than is that every other website. We really messed up the internet.

Speed is the most important UX feature.

I've emphasized this, repeatedly, to ~every product owner I've worked with in my 26-year career.

I believe it's morally wrong to make software that makes people wait needlessly. If your software makes me wait, it better have something to do with the speed of light.

Someone on here I think runs Plain Text Sports. I rarely follow games, but I like the idea of such a simple site.

https://plaintextsports.com/

https://text.npr.org/ text onli version of NPR (National Public Radio)

http://68k.news/

is also a nice one

I am used to this, having used all sorts of bad internet connections over the years. Too much of the internet is designed on fast computers with fast internet and excellent monitors. Some of my best work was done on a 12” MacBook with a spotty hotel WiFi. I pay very close attention to page speed.

I live in Sylva which is about 45 minutes from Asheville and yeah, Cell service made getting any useful information on your phone pretty bad. If I hadn't had Starlink I would have been in the dark for at least a week on a whole lot of stuff.

If I could sum up much of the miserableness of this disaster event it would be communication breakdowns in all kinds of ways.

As a workaround, you can try using Opera Mini and configure the Data Savings option.

Buncombe honestly did a much better job than the surrounding counties. Up here in Madison County most of the updates were only posted on Facebook. A lot of the updates from here and surrounding counties were posted on Facebook as photos of text or videos with no caption.

I get that these counties don’t have the budget or the technical staff for this but it’s really unfortunate.

Plus, what you call "shitty 3G" is (a) not really that bad objectively speaking (better than dialup 20 so years ago), and (b) actually the norm for hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people. I always think it's very depressing and even hypocritical how little the average SV dev cares about anyone with less than an iphone 15 with 4G in their pocket.

Is Asheville in SV?

In any case, in places like eg India 4G is more common than 3G. 3G is being phased out. 5G is rolling out.

(I realise that India isn't the poorest of the poor anymore. But not sure that's necessary for your argument?)

Asheville is in Western North Carolina

Thanks. Yes, that's what Google told me, too. I was just confused by andrepd's accusation.

well, people without 4G or a later phone model probably don't have the money for your $5 per month service anyways, so why care about them at all /s

I know you meant this sarcastically. BUT, when traveling, my phone has a free 3g, unlimited data plan. So, you run into these problems even in modern society.

oh, good point. actually had this experience this week. for some reason 4G/5G was unavailable and all i had was H+. NOTHING worked. couldn't buy a train ticket from my phone, websites didn't load etc.

all i was able to do was to send and receive signal/telegram/etc. messages...

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