Would the internet survive Armageddon?
Some of the internet would continue to run for a few days – a phone switch in the basement of the WTC was still running after the towers collapsed – but once batteries and generators are exhausted, no more internet. There’s also doubt as to how long it would take and how much effort would be needed to reboot the internet after a complete shutdown. In either case, local bicycle power isn’t enough for the current infrastructure. If however you’re willing to use less common means of communication, like packet radio, with the right wavelength you could have low bandwidth internet over large distances pretty quickly.
Without fairly ubiquitous electrical power, there will be no internet. Circuits that connect things need power for repeaters and other methods to cross large physical distance would work without localized power. You might have satellite access for a while, but even they rely on specialized earth stations for control and connectivity. As mentioned above, without the DNS system, not much would work right either, since you’d be reduced, best case, to direct IP addressing. My suggestion would be that a new network, much like Fidonet, would spring up. Basically, the internet would become non-instant. Requests for information would travel node to node by what ever method available. In concept, you can use ham or shortwave radio to transmit data from point to point. Or you can use a hard drive or flash drive physically moved between locations to pass the data requests and answers. So you could imagine a request from London sent to New York vi
No. The internet doesnt exist like that. The internet consists of fiber and copper capital owned and maintained by the phone companies. They are always working on keeping their capacities up under during normal everyday conditions. Toss in disaster and no one is routing anywhere anymore. Peer to peer wifi on the other hand… Look at the OLPC wifi implementation on how to run a network without an infrastructure. Some good search terms are mesh and peer-to-peer wifi.
