Preparing for a Cell Service Outage During a Disaster

What to Do Now

Below are four steps you can take today to prepare yourself and your community during an emergency:

• Keep an emergency AM/FM radio with a hand crank to serve as a backup USB powered battery/power generator.

• Download apps such as FireChat and LiteChat, so you can communicate with others using Bluetooth or WiFi from your phone. These apps wirelessly transfer files without needing to be connected to the Internet like you would with Apple’s AirDrop or Android’s Fast Share applications.

• Use built-in smartphone features to beacon for assistance. On an iPhone or Android you can change the name of your phone to indicate basic information about the help you need. For instance, you can use a WiFi Hotspot name such as HELP-TRAPPED+Time+Location. Then enable the Hotspot on your phone to beacon your request for help wirelessly. Note this will use up significant battery power. If you do not have a battery backup on hand, consider only turning this on when you know someone is near, or selectively turning it at set intervals in order to conserve battery power. Also, consider turning on battery saving mode, but note that this may automatically turn off your WiFi hotspot. In order to receive messages, set your phone to allow "Everyone" to Airdrop or Fast Share to your device. This feature can be used to send "notes" files back and forth as a crude way of texting messages without cell service.

As you can see, all of these solutions are imperfect. We need to be able to communicate freely over existing cellular bands once primary cellular connections go offline.

Short-Term Strategies

The above options have very limited range. To further increase your preparedness during a disaster, you may want to consider setting up a local community network to improve connectivity across a longer distance. Projects such as Disaster.radio have created solar-powered radio kits that can keep remote communities connected even if primary connections are severed.

Other hardware-based offline mesh network options, such as GoTenna, BearTooth, and Sonnet, can extend the range of point-to-point communications, but they cost additional money and require both sides to have an additional device to relay information.

To date, GoTenna has one of the largest citizen-powered mesh relay networks. This means that volunteers have their GoTenna Antenna devices continuously charged and powered off of batteries or solar panels. During an outage, this network can transmit very simple text messages through this large network of volunteers. Downsides of the system include that messages cannot be very long, users cannot send more than six messages in a minute, and they have to be paired with an existing GoTenna and have the app already installed for the system to work.

Additionally, it is best to download offline maps so you have a copy of the terrain and area around you with key landmarks as needed. Apps like Google Maps allow you to download a pre-selected area ahead of time. They can function for 30 days at a time before needing to check in for updates.

Long-Term Strategies

It is ironic that technology has existed for many years to request help if you are lost at sea through radio-based beacons, yet no high-quality subscription-free equivalent exists on land because we all assume cell phone networks will continue to work in an emergency. Smartphones are many times more capable than even the best satellite-based Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacons (EPIRBs), but without a connection they alone are largely useless for sending out calls for help. There is a simple solution: by being able to connect to other mobile phones around you without needing to first go through a cell phone tower, you could beacon out your exact location and request for assistance without service.

Consider reaching out to your representatives or the FCC to ask them how they plan on improving the reliability of our critical networks in the near term. See our Solutions section for more ideas for simple ways we could all be made safer in an emergency through the use of the Helpful Alternative Link Protocol (HALP) as a fallback network.