Say, some alien just wanted to mess with us, but doesn’t invade, or even care enough to want to kill us, but seeing how everyone is on their phone all the time, they decided to just jam all our radios to watch us suffer. Their transmitting power they use is so powerful, its jamming signals are 1000 times stronger than the strongest radios we have, so there’s no way we can overpower the jamming.
What does the immediate aftermath look like?
What does it look like in the long term?
(Please don’t say “kill the aliens” they have tech so advanced, its impossible to do it)
If it’s from outer space, there’s frequencies that are absorbed by the atmosphere. We don’t use them because their range sucks. Blasting the sky with enough of that to make a difference on the ground would surely have worse side effects than ‘the wifi is down.’ It would be a doomsday weapon. If we presume that’s not the scenario, then short-range connections would remain feasible. So would line-of-sight protocols using lasers or infrared blinkenlights.
The dark comedy version of this wouldn’t even leave it as an option: they could blast radio waves toward Earth’s future position. An intergalactic churro of electromagnetism in transit. And anywhere on that side of the Earth, anything resembling a cats-whisker AM radio buzzes out a weaponized instance of “nine billion bottles of beer on the wall.”
Actually, if we’re going hard sci-fi on the effect (but hand-waving the plausibility of the cause) then a lot of metallic things become dangerous. Any long piece of wire becomes a fork in the microwave. As someone else points out: this is also Tesla’s free-energy towers. Deeply ironic, considering that portable electronics are now a lot less useful!
Anyway: if it’s not from outer space, but sort of emanates all over, that’s a different story. Fun causes, too. Like if our galaxy wandered somewhere that vacuum energy worked differently. Instead of virtual particles you get virtual static. Very exciting for physicists. Nobody else is happy.
GPS doesn’t work - though with 2020s technology we’d immediately do camera-based dead reckoning and mapping for airplanes. Cars? Nope, better pay attention to street signs and manually confirm when you reach a turn. Oh, and we’re all going back to MP3 players and aux jacks, since Spotify, Sirius, and 101.3 The Claw are all fucked.
The omnipresence of internet access would be maintained. The demand is too high. But now it’d mean ethernet ports everywhere, like a college classroom built circa 2000. No, wait: “li-fi” blinking LEDs would finally catch on. Less wear and tear. You can still plug in some fiber-optic cable to be sure there’s a connection. Otherwise you have to huddle around a lightbulb, or be in the same closed room, in order to use the mobile internet. Bandwidth’s a non-issue - but you’d never “stream” anything, versus downloading it and walking away. The unreliability of being able to purchase bullshit at a moment’s notice would have a huge positive effect on mobile games.
Terrestrial television would end, which I assume matters to somebody. In the US the FCC would cease to exist as an excuse to censor media.