This past Tuesday millions of cellphones across Mexico fell silent. Reuters reported that omni-present ringtones and conversations conducted by solitary people on the side of the roads were suddenly treated to the golden silence that once pervaded all American movie theaters.
No, this was not due to a rediscovered sense of manners and propriety, but because of a “technical problem” with the cellular phone network.
According to the link provided by ZDNet News, they implied that these “technical problems” derive from vulnerabilities in the Windows Mobile and Symbian operating systems on mobile devices. Because many cell phones, PDA’s and blackberries et al have internet access, particularly malicious websites or jpegs can potentially carry out DOS attacks, or Denial-of-Service attacks, aimed to render computer/internet resources unavailable to the user.
Apparently, the network was “saturated” with such errors and crashed yesterday for hours. The Telcel cell phone network, owned by America Movil, has 40 million people attached to it’s network, most of whom reside in an around Mexico City.
This is just another recent example of how dependent and, thus, how vulnerable we are to technological failures. We seem so impressed with our internet, TiVo, and digital cameras that we don’t realize we are a hiccup away from calamity, and the fact that this occurred in Mexico this time and not the United States shouldn’t offer any consolation. If anything such a potential disaster makes us more vulnerable than Mexico because of our utter dependence on this technology.
As the world races toward erecting wireless towers, busily plugging parts of the world’s cranium together with invisible cables, our concrete infrastructure deteriorates under a mindless negligence and an utter disregard of reality.
As wonderful and magical as wireless technology is, it cannot replace the physical infrastructure upon which it is built. A wireless capable laptop or blackberry is fundamentally useless without the energy required to send and receive the signals, from towers, from hotspots. What’s more, cell phone towers are inherently much more vulnerable to the whims of chance and nature than “land-lines”.
In the ongoing winter freeze sweeping across America, first in the West, then the South, and now the Midwest to New England, we have seen power lines and telecommunication lines bend and crack under the weight of hard ice. Hundreds are still without power. (Heck, I don’t even know if people in Colorado have electricity yet— and they lost it in December!)
If weather can do this to physical structures, it is not hard to imagine what would happen to wireless communications in such an eventuality, since wireless connections are, by nature, fickle and tenuous and very much at the mercy of its environment.
Like our aging power grid, most of our telecommunications infrastructure was also constructed about half a century ago and is in terrible need of an overhaul. Even at this late date, it is still within our ability to remedy this sad state of affairs and do it rather painlessly, if we would be willing to be inconvenienced by road detours and noise from all the digging.
Is that such a heavy price to pay if such an inconvenience would ultimately save lives and keep people warm?
If you have doubts at our vulnerability and the very likely chance of calamity, look to our already failing power grids in the Northeast and West, as well as Mexico’s temporary cell phone outage.
Mexico’s cell phone network fiasco didn’t even require severe weather, just a little sip of human sinfulness.
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