Why You Need a Comms Continuity Plan
How to Build One That Works
You may have noticed the pattern in this note: simultaneous carrier spikes across Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T in the same time window - not random blips but a correlated anomaly.
Tracking sites like Downdetector don’t flag routine variance. They trigger when reports exceed the expected baseline for that time of day.
Isolated carrier issues happen constantly. What stood out here was near-identical surge curves across multiple providers at once.
When three independent networks degrade together, the explanation usually isn’t a single tower or a local weather cell. The likely causes narrow quickly to shared infrastructure and systemic stress.
That’s because telecom networks aren’t independent stacks. They’re layered systems.
What looks like a single tower on your phone is only the first step in a longer chain.
Local towers feed into regional systems, which then connect to long-distance fiber and shared exchange points.
A fault or overload above the individual carrier layer, in a backbone route, a shared vendor service, or an aggregation point, can propagate across multiple carriers at the same time.
That’s the why.
Modern communications systems are resilient by design, but they are not invulnerable.
Redundancy exists to minimize downtime from routine faults, not to guarantee uninterrupted connectivity in every scenario.
What people experience during these events is predictable. Data drops. Signal bars disappear. SMS and voice become unreliable. Real-time routing slows or fails entirely.
That’s a coordination failure for anyone relying on these systems for navigation, authentication, payments, or family safety.
Here’s the practical part.
If your plan assumes “everything works,” you don’t actually have a plan.
A continuity plan is simply an agreed-upon way to stay in touch when normal communication stops being reliable.
