Fair enough, I didn't flesh out my thought. My concern is the wider effects of the loss of communications satellites as a whole, most of which live in only a few orbits.

What percentage of telecom traffic were there is more than 100 miles between the parties goes over land lines, vs satellite? 500 miles? I know that the undersea cables can't maintain global communications at their current level, they don't have the band width. That gives us greatly reduced vox telephone traffic, plus the interweb which I have very real doubts that most government agencies and major corporations could survive without for any length of time. And you might even see rationing of the phone circuits, so that government and "critical commercial" traffic gets through. That's going to have people really annoyed in about two or three hours.

Loss of communications has major economic issues, all negative. The good news is that no one past, say, Boston would know that after noon just about badly the busted oracle on Wall Street paniced, that would itself trigger panic. Add in the loss of business due to that loss of communications. And without good communications, even if you have power, good luck with plastic. I know I'd be making a trip to my bank's major local bank first thing in the morning (no web, I've got the day off- our software is web based), because I know by noon there will be a run. (Hypocracy, I know.) And that is just the first two or three days.

At the same time, the loss of the comm sats means that there will be a disruption of TV. I know, big deal, but lets face it- it is the modern pacifier. With luck, people will talk to their families and neighbors, yeah! But how many of us believe in good luck- if you trust in luck that much, you wouldn't have a water and long shelf life food and probably ammunition squirreled away. I expect a small but very loud portion of the population will wake up, and they aren't people we want unsedated, bored, and roaming the streets waiting to find out that they can't get money, and their plastic is no good. I'd give it that first two or three days before we started to see riots due to a full comm outage.

Never mind what it would do with long range shipping by road, rail, sea or air. Or international trade.

That is why I worry about the communications birds getting taken out. I don't care about what was done for thousands of years. Twenty years ago we weren't addicted to the web and GPS. Twenty years ago we didn't put something north of 80% of our transactions on plastic, and we didn't have stores that try to refuse cash and flat out won't take a check. That is where we are now. And it isn't going to get better without a hard, painful spasm.