Hopefully something will come out of this. The system is indeed very fragile and I don't think people realize it.
In this newsgroup we see numerous articles of serious outages. Very troubling.
Sadly, with wireless, most people are more tolerant of a much lower quality and reliability of service than of the past.
For instance, in the old days, the telephone company supplied power for the central office so even if commercial power failures, most phones kept working. The phoneco had batteries and diesel generators as backup.
When I lost power for a week due to hurricane, my landline phone service never stopped working. People with cellphones or cable phones lost service. FIOS users had a few hours and they went dead, too.
Unfortunately, our commercial power network is equally fragile and at high risk for a major blowout.
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