Some good ideas, but there's some issues with it. Expecting public safety to support commercial cell carriers creates some issues. Which carrier do they support? Who pays for the equipment? See discussion above about backhaul. etc…..
lots of talk about recovery after the disaster
What about keeping the cellphones running during the disaster? gonna need expanded coverage from remaining sites
Sector antennas used by many cell carriers have the ability to be remotely adjusted. "Electric Downtilt" is used to adjust the coverage of the cell site. Cell carriers could, theoretically, adjust adjacent site antenna to help restore some coverage, but there's only so much they can do.
-In mountainous areas, like where the Camp fire happened, there may not be adjacent cells sites in view to do this.
-Due to tower height, power limitations, etc. they would only be able to squeeze so much out of adjacent sites.
-It would require someone understanding what was going on, what the individual site coverages are, and adapting on the fly.
Issues with that is cellular carriers have designed their systems for consumer convenience, not public safety.
- or hardened sites - or contingency capacity on demand - or reserve sites - or something.
Well, that would all certainly be nice to have. But...
-Hardening a radio site is very expensive and really needs to be done as part of the initial construction. There's a lot of limitations put on cell sites and where they are located.
-"Contingency capacity on demand" alert broadcasts don't take much bandwidth, so not really needed. Issue is the cell site has to be running and connected back into the network.
-"Reserve Sites"? Back many many years ago I was told by a cell site engineer that an average cellular site runs about $500,000 to build out. That's a lot of money to just have spare ones sitting around. Of course prices have come down, but that's a lot of investment that would only be beneficial if and when there was a disaster. The ways cell carriers like to deal with this is with the Cell On Wheels (COW) approach. A cell site mounted on a truck that can be brought in as needed.
How about a stingray in every cop car. First cop car heads to scene to figure out exactly where the emergency is happening - 2nd cop car heads to high site over the scene and activates stingray. Now we have restored ability transmit wireless alerts to public; and to receive 911 calls from public - as the disaster unfolds - or in the first 10 minutes after.
Cops are not radio guys. They have too many other things to be doing.
A better approach is to let the OES people handle it the way they are set up to.
Putting all your eggs into the cellular basket isn't a good solution. The existing cellular networks are too fragile to really be relied on in an emergency.
The issue isn't necessarily that cell carriers are doing a poor job. The issue is that the average consumer puts way too much trust in their cell phones and the cell carriers. The assumption that the cellular network will always be there and always be working is not based on any good analysis. It's an idea perpetuated by cell phone sales people. Consumers want to believe it, so they do. If you read through this thread, you'll see a lot of experienced people telling you it's not a good idea. Not a good idea at all.
Before cell phones the world got along pretty well. Public safety had ways of notifying the public. Issue is that many agencies have gone the same route as consumers, assuming that cellular carriers will solve all the issues for free. We need to get off that thinking.