Comms redundancy proves its value

Engineering lessons learned during previous disasters have helped lessen the impact of the 11 March earthquake and tsunami on Japan´s communications infrastructure. Although no amount of preparation could protect communications systems in the worst-hit areas, elsewhere a combination of redundancy, resilience and disaster planning appears to have paid-off. Each operator has disaster plans that were put to work once the quake struck, with message boards on their service through which users could message family and friends without overloading the network with voice calls. The disaster may prove to be an opportunity to change the architecture of Japan´s cellular network so that it is more robust.