Well I don't think utterly useless! Of course WiFi (ISM2400) was designed for short range communications. Yet in ideal circumstances it has been shown to work over one or two kilometers! If the power goes down the cell towers go down too (read... NO communications, including Ham Radio et al) but all the other electronic hardware like microwaves etc. are also gone (read...NO noise) and so likely some range improvement can be expected. Our batteries may last another 6 or 8 hours yet, time enough indeed to call emergency services, your broker, the wife or whomever providing their cellphones are capable. Therein lies the nub of the problem! Serval are developing a nifty solution that allows a phone running their software to act as an access-point (without the backhaul) and therefore be able to upload the Serval software to nearby phones. This combined with their MeshMS (read..SMS without the networks) could see the program propagated exponentially in short time. The system must work independently of the networks and it must run on our existing hardware...this is the challenge. If Serval save a single soul it will be utterly worthwhile!