Amateur radio in the USA is forbidden by law to engage in
broadcasting. Amateur radio in the USA is forbidden by law to
be a public communications common carrier...that is, specifically
as a provider of radio communications services. Amateur radio
regulations even state that amateur communications themselves
are to be of a trivial nature and amateurs themselves are
supposed to avail themselves of commercial communications
services for non-trivial communications.

This rule exists more to protect our bands from being taken over
by commercial interests. Can you imagine getting sued for
QRM?



Physically, the cellular telephone services, an adjunct to the
wired telephone infrastructure, does NOT "go down" either "first"
or last. TELEPHONE communications is "jammed" only by too many
panic-stricken subscribers trying to use it simultaneously at the
onset of some emergency. The TELEPHONE infrastructure would not
have survived as a communications service provider if "all"
subscribers were free to use it simultaneously.

It takes a regional disaster to make that happen, like
earthquakes. Stuff like car accidents is easily taken care
of with cell phones. But a regional disaster may take
out the phone system physically or it gets overloaded.
And many times hams handle the lower priority "health and
welfare" traffic to free up the police and fire comms
for the more important stuff.


" The people who are going to be taking care
of the real communications are sitting right here in this room. It's
the Amateur Radio service. And in the first few days, or the first few
hours of these multi-jurisdictional incidents, it's the amateurs who
keep things going."


In light of recent REAL EMERGENCIES, REAL HISTORY has shown
that the commercial services HAVE CONTINUED TO WORK despite
SOME of their facilities being "downed." Facilities are NOT
RESTRICTED to JUST telephones, wired and/or cellular. There
are, in this nation, literally, hundreds of thousands of OTHER
radios which can, and have, been used for two-way communications.
That is NOT counting CB or the approximately 100 million
cellular telephone radio handsets.

CBs are sometimes useful, but cell phones without the phone
system are useless. They can only talk to a tower, not to
other cell phones. (Not sure of those "walkie talkie" feature
some cell providers supply, but that might require the cell
tower to function as a repeater).




"It puts them in a very difficult position when they have to defend
examples of conduct that other countries hear."

THose third world dictators don't like our ability to
complain about our government.... :-)