Fixed-lines and SHTF

My wife has a mid size air duct manufacturing company, which she manages along with her mother and sister.
It’s not a big company, but it has some heavy machinery, a large plant, and a steady work force of 20 employees.

The plant is located in one of the biggest industrial parks, near the docks and crime is pretty intense there.

One of the problems she’s facing these days is having a steady phone line for work, the way they manage most sales.

They currently have Nextel, but since Nextel refuses to install a battery backup system, they are left without phone whenever power goes down.

Here’s where every savvy survival minded person starts preaching about a landline.

We’ll, its not THAT secure, and not for the reasons you may be guessing.

You see, since there’s so much poverty in Argentina right now, people steal the telephone lines to sell the copper they are made of.

This happens often enough, maybe too often, and the telephone company decided to “fix” the problem, “Third Word” style.

By contract they must fix the lines, but since they don’t want to do it they claim that they have a 30-60 day waiting period because they are overwhelmed by these incidents.

Of course, no company can survive two months without phone, so they end up paying for the repairs themselves, paying the same people the phone company subsidizes the repairs to.

Now, there’s no knowing when the cables will be stolen next. You may end up paying for them several times a month.

So the only safe alternative is to have a wireless line.

I thought that this was pretty curious and I wouldn’t have imagine this problem in a million years, so I thought it was worth mentioning.

An escalation in the social unrest and poverty may leave you without a phone line permanently, just because there’s no way to secure them.

FerFAL