[jpollock]

There are a couple reasons you lose cell coverage in an earthquake.

1) Loss of electricity.

2) Congestion.

This doesn't fix either of them. Everyone is still going to pick up their phone, and the lines (power and network) will still be cut.

In fact, it makes it worse, since it is no longer possible to bring in a generator and provide power to the street lights.

Since routing, billing and interconnection are centralised, networks with longer wires are less reliable. The likelihood of a break increases with distance.

What it will do is provide quick and easy blanket coverage without the pesky nimby's knowing they are surrounded by cell towers.

[EdwardDiego]

Exactly. 1) is usually already catered for (for some hours, at least) with battery backups at the cell towers, and as for 2), only building capacity not needed 99.9% of the time will fix it.

During the Christchurch 2011 earthquake, the cellular services were taken down immediately by several hundred thousand people simultaenously trying to ring loved ones. Luckily the payphones were still operational to an extent - you couldn't call within Christchurch, but calling to locations outside of Christchurch worked.

It took about 8 or 9 hours for the backlog of SMS messages to be delivered on the day of the quake.