Quote:
Originally Posted by Taf
I understand that during a power outage, the mobile masts would stop working within minutes. So a mobile backup would be pointless.  |
Highly unlikely. I lived in remote ruraldom for almost 20 years and experienced multiple week-long power cuts as a result of severe storms. We never lost mobile coverage once in that time.
*If* a mast loses power, then yes, it won’t stay online for long. But there are lots of masts in any given area, and they unlikely all to be connected to the same part of the power distribution network as each other and also you. So a power cut affecting you is unlikely to affect every single mobile phone mast you could potentially connect to (and if you make a 999 call then any network will pick it up, not just your own). Wide area power cuts that take out entire clusters of villages and all the mobile phones are extremely rare, are usually caused by a single failure near the core of the local distribution network, and because of the threat they pose to large numbers of people there are effective plans in place that repair them quickly (we had one or two of those as well but they never lasted more than an hour or two, and guess what - even then we could get mobile signal because at least one mast was on a different part of the power grid).
Storm Arwen in 2021 did knock significant numbers of masts out, leaving chunks of rural areas without any connectivity, but this was highly exceptional. And a storm that destructive is just as likely to take down an old-fashioned telephone line as it is an electricity cable.