On Thursday, February 22, I woke to my normal routine and noticed my phone had the letters ‘SOS’ where the cellular bars should have been. I quickly learned there was a nationwide cellular outage. This didn’t affect everyone in the house. The prospect of heading out to meet somebody for breakfast meant I had to prearrange where and when we were to meet just like we did when I was young.
What was more striking to me was one of the kids who also was unable to use cellular did not have any concept how cellular networks were different than WiFi. I know nobody is born knowing any of this, but I could see I failed my children by not giving them basic knowledge of how the various antennae work in the phones they are so bonded with. The very idea that they don’t think or care about being connected to WiFi versus the Cellular network has never crossed their mind. Why would it in this modern age of “unlimited data” and increasingly fast 5G network speeds. This really is a hold out from my younger days and probably the equivalent of making kids drive a manual transmission.