Connected Anxiety

Tonight, at the El Paso airport, there was a lady that came up to the desk with her Iphone 5 that had an apparent dead battery.  This lady distraught to the point of a full on anxiety attack wanted to plug her USB cable into one of our laptops, which would be fine, had it not been for the fact that cell phones are like memory cards, and can hold information or viruses inside of them, becoming pigeons of death for anything that they connect to.  So, say you allow somebody you don't know, or someone you do know to plug their phone into your USB connection on your laptop, you now have no idea if their is a virus that is going to attack your firewalls and then send all of your private and personal information across the web, and into the hands of someone that can use it to reap havoc.  No thank you.

7 Degrees of Connection

Back in 1998 when I first arrived in Germany, I was introduced to the cellphone age through Siemans and Nokia phones, with Nokia cornering the market share, and Deutsche Telecom had the best network in the Bavaria region.  In the U.S., Motorola had the market with their gargantuan phones that could either be in the executive office, or planted in a vehicle, and were very expensive.

Now, in 2014, not only has the United States blossomed into a inter-connected country, but, now the connections between people that used to be consumed with face-to-face meetings, has now been replaced with text messages/sms transfers.

My question for this super connected world is this?  What happens to communication when a cell phone connection is no longer possible due to a catastrophic fire, or other natural disaster?  Will the evolution of connectivity blossom again into the satellite connection for all?  When do you think we will get there?