There’s always an xkcd Link
I’m a Ham and we send digital messages including a form of electronic email over the air. I’ve exchanged the equivalent of emails across continents with no intermediary. There will always be connection where there is a will. There will be some kind of network, but it might not be the one we have today.
Harsh truth, the entire bandwidth of all the HF bands combined, not just the ham allocations, fully DC to ~30MHz, is smaller than a single mediocre home internet connection (per Shannon Hartley theorem). If even 0.1% of the world started using ham radios to do so much as send the bare minimum of ultra compact text messages to each other the entire spectrum would be clogged to the point of uselessness.
HF is great for very localized communications disruptions, but a nationwide or worldwide internet failure would not remotely be helped via HF.
You’re not wrong there. This model doesn’t scale, but there are solutions to this that can help us rebuild that I believe will get people back to a network eventually.
I participate in monthly exercises where we use a repeater system to relay messages in emergencies somewhat like how the telegraph system worked. In this way, we can re-use the limited bandwidth geographically. HF works at the current load but for higher bandwidth needs we can move to regional (say, a 10-meter net of which I know of one regional) or even local repeater systems at higher frequencies and find that much more usable bandwidth becomes available. Several US states have wide repeater networks fully operational at this moment.
In a total collapse situation we could start with HF and form new communities that can scale in much the same way that people scale to form social groups when shouting in a large room isn’t working anymore. In fact, most areas already have multiple local repeaters and sometimes an emergency net. It can happen if the demand is there in an Internet collapse situation.
The only thing that could take the entirety of the Internet for a bit of time is a massive EMF event that damages enough infrastructure to disable point-to-point communication between nodes. This means something like a Coronal Mass Ejection so large it cooks all satellites on its way in (on one side of orbit at least), then toasts a lot of other protected hardware on the ground.
The P2P nature of the internet would be hard to kill in totality with one event in any sense of the word. At the the very least, it would quick to get local infrastructure up within hours, assuming the entire DNS system isn’t destroyed.
CMEs cause very long-length disturbances so you need a conductor of quite a length to cause problems. The power grid is one example. Anything that’s on a solar panel and not connected to the grid would not be a problem because the wires are much shorter and don’t have enough space with which to build up a charge.
You seem to think the entire world is connected by fiber now. Not the case. 98% of long distance cable runs across the world are still air run copper. That won’t immediately impact high dollar facilities like datacenters or undersea cables that are interconnected, but everything else it will take a hit.
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When things get dire, the fast and high bandwidth Internet we know will be gone, but a form of slow, intermittent Internet will probably be around; still technically an Internet.
This post has a lot of serious answers to what is essentially a “no”:
In the UK, there is a non-virtual contingency plan, or at least there was. If the internet shuts down, the people who know how it works will meet up in a pub outside London and decide what to do, says Murdoch.
“I don’t know if this is still the case. It was quite a few years ago and I was never told which pub it was.”
Meeting up in a pub is a good enough idea no matter which pub it is, apparently, if the Internet shuts down.
