A Household Communication Plan for When the Network Is Down
Figures last verified
The most useful thing in a household communication plan is a piece of card in each person's wallet with a phone number on it that is not local. It costs nothing, it does not need charging, and it works when the thing everyone was relying on has stopped.
Radios are the interesting part of this subject and the part people buy first. The plan is the part that determines whether the radios help.
Why local calling fails first
During a regional emergency the cellular network usually does not fail outright. It congests. Everyone in the affected area picks up a phone at the same moment, and the local capacity that was sized for normal demand cannot carry it.
The counterintuitive consequence is that a call across the country often completes when a call across the street does not. The congestion is concentrated where the event is. A number outside the affected region is reachable by whoever gets a signal, from wherever they are.
Text also frequently succeeds where voice fails, because a message is a small packet that can retry in the background rather than needing a circuit held open for the duration. If a call will not connect, send a text and let it keep trying.
The four pieces
An out-of-area contact. One person, outside your region, who everyone in the household can reach and who agrees to be the hub. Each person reports in to them rather than trying to reach each other directly. The contact keeps a list of who has checked in and passes it on. This turns a scramble of failed calls into one working relay.
Pick someone who will answer an unknown number and who is not going to be in the same event you are.
A meeting point, and a second one. The first is near the house, for the case where you cannot get back inside. The second is further away, for the case where the whole area has to be left. Both need to be places everyone can find without a phone, describable in words a child can repeat, and reachable on foot if necessary.
A check-in time. If communication fails entirely, everyone attempts contact at agreed times rather than continuously. On the hour for five minutes is easy to remember. This matters enormously for radio, where continuous monitoring drains batteries and continuous calling clogs a channel, and it matters for phones because it concentrates attempts rather than spreading them thin.
A written card. Each person carries the out-of-area number, both meeting points, and the check-in times, on paper. Not in a phone. The entire premise is that the phone may be dead, broken, out of signal, or in the other room.
Children should have one in a school bag. Adults should have one in a wallet. Write it on something that survives a wash.
Writing it down, once
The plan fits on a card. A useful format:
| Line | What goes on it |
|---|---|
| Out-of-area contact | Name and number, clearly not a local number |
| Meeting point 1 | Near the house, findable without a phone |
| Meeting point 2 | Outside the area, reachable on foot if needed |
| Check-in times | For example, on the hour, for five minutes |
| Radio channel | Channel and any tone, if the household has radios |
| One medical note | Anything a stranger would need to know |
That is the whole artefact. The discipline is not in the design, it is in everyone actually having one.
Where radios fit
If the household has radios, the plan is where the channel gets agreed, and it is the difference between radios that help and radios that sit in a drawer with flat batteries.
Agree one primary channel and one fallback. Write both on the card. If you use a repeater, write the repeater channel as primary and a simplex channel as the fallback, because the repeater is infrastructure that can fail in the same event. That reasoning is worked through in GMRS repeaters.
Agree the check-in times for radio as well. A group that monitors continuously runs its batteries flat during the quiet first day and has nothing left on the second.
And be realistic about coverage. The working distance between your actual locations is a thing to measure rather than assume, for the reasons in why 35 miles is never 35 miles. A plan that assumes a range the radios do not have is worse than no plan, because it produces confident waiting in the wrong place.
Which service the household should be on is a separate question, answered in FRS, GMRS, or ham.
Practising it, briefly
Once a year, at a time nobody is stressed, call the out-of-area contact and confirm they still agree and the number still works. People move, change numbers, and forget they volunteered.
Walk to meeting point one. Confirm the children can describe where it is without prompting. If you have radios, take them to the actual places you would be, not around the house, and check whether they work there.
The whole exercise is an hour and it is the only part of this subject that has ever been tested by the people relying on it.
What this does not solve
A plan does not create coverage that does not exist, and it does not make anyone easier to find if they have gone somewhere nobody agreed on. It reduces the number of decisions that have to be made under pressure by a group of people who cannot consult each other, which is a smaller claim than it sounds and a more useful one.
It also does nothing about receiving warnings, which is a separate channel with its own failure modes, covered in what actually wakes you up.
Evidence labels
- Confirmed: cellular networks congest under concentrated local demand, and text messages retry in the background where a voice call requires a held connection.
- Operational inference: an out-of-area relay contact routes around local congestion, and agreed check-in windows conserve both battery and channel capacity compared with continuous attempts.
- Unknown until tested: whether your household's radios cover the distances your plan assumes, whether your contact answers, and whether everyone can actually find the meeting points without a phone.
Sources
The out-of-area contact and household meeting-point structure is long-standing emergency management guidance, published in similar form by national and local preparedness agencies. No figures are quoted here because the plan contains none: it is a set of agreements rather than a specification.