If digital communications are disrupted, the site can switch to analogue technology with assistance from the Radio Amateurs' Emergency Network.

BBC: Bunker mentality: The Cold War bunkers still in use

In high-tech circles, cable bosses are seen as small-town people with a small-town mentality, running local monopolies badly and steeped in old-fashioned analogue technology.

ECONOMIST: Television and the Internet

Around 40% of the network still uses outdated analogue technology. (Argentina, which privatised its phones in 1991, has an almost fully digital network.) That, plus equally outdated labour practices, has meant that Brazil's telecoms industry has an average of one full-time worker per 108 lines, less than half the productivity achieved in the United States.

ECONOMIST: A clear line from Brazil

It's the part that's now being used for analogue TV signals and that's being freed up because TV channels have been moving to digital technology.

NPR: Google Enters the Cell Phone Race

And new innovations such as printed circuit technology and the white space radio spectrum (transmitting data over unused TV channel airwaves as we switch from analogue to digital TV) are all helping to create a world where everything can talk to everything else, and everything to us.

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