IT Home, March 14th report: Bloomberg published a blog post yesterday (March 13th) reporting that Moscow, the capital of Russia, has experienced large-scale and prolonged mobile network outages this month. In response to this extremely unstable network situation, local residents have started to purchase offline communication devices and paper maps.
Based on data from Russia's major e-commerce platform Wildberries, compared to early February, the sales of handheld walkie-talkies increased by 27% in early March this year, while pager sales surged by 73%.
IT Home Note: Pagers, also known as BP machines, are one-way or two-way portable communication devices that can only receive short text or numeric messages. They were widely used before the popularity of smartphones and have regained popularity in internet outage situations because they do not rely on mobile internet.
The sales of paper maps have seen the most remarkable growth. Among them, road maps (focused on transportation networks, including highways, national roads, gas stations, etc.) saw sales more than double, with an increase of 170%; at the same time, the purchase volume of foldable maps (not limited to themes, such as hiking maps, city tourism maps, etc.) also jumped by 70%.
Moscow residents have been complaining about unstable connections or complete service interruptions from major mobile operators, and Wi-Fi in the city's metro system has also frequently malfunctioned.
According to TASS, in order to prevent sudden internet service outages, the famous Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow has officially requested audiences to print tickets in advance or save them locally on their phones before watching the performance.
Original: toutiao.com/article/7616983845258215962/
Statement: This article represents the personal views of the author.