William wrote:


I would hazard a quess that the average American Citizen DOES know
someone with a cell phone. Cell phones are almost ubiquitous, so much
so that they are annoyances. 100 million subscriptions, 265 million
people. You do the math.

And the network becomes useless in an emergency, that is why military
and civil officials do not consider the cell network to be a viable
means of communications in a major disaster, it isn't even in their
emergency planning. Ham radio is. So next time there is a major
disaster, have fun punching numbers into you little cell phone
attempting to call twenty of your friends to warn them or tell them to,
"turn on your tee-vee", and when you can't get through because of all
the other cell users flooding the system doing the same, you can amuse
yourself by playing a game on your phone which has now become nothing
more than a game-boy.