In reality, a similar scenario happened a long time ago, at the beginning of the cosmos:
In the Big Bang cosmological models, during the earliest periods, the universe was filled with an opaque fog of dense, hot plasma of sub-atomic particles. As the universe expanded, this plasma cooled to the point where protons and electrons combined to form neutral atoms of mostly hydrogen. Unlike the plasma, these atoms could not scatter thermal radiation by Thomson scattering, and so the universe became transparent. (Source)
Before being transparent, “light” would not travel further. The era of recombination, which happened when the cosmos was “merely” 380,000 years old, allowed “light” to travel further. This “light” was also radio wave and microwave, and it was part of the white noise back when people still used analog receptor devices, such as radio receptors and analog TV sets. One could still hear it through analog ham radio transceivers and receptors that are still used today, such as Baofeng UV-5R and RTL-SDR dongles connected to a PC.
In your scenario, EM at the radio range wouldn’t propagate, while the rest of the EM frequencies would propagate just fine.
Well, many of the technologies we use in a daily basis are microwave radiation. Access point routers (Wi-fi) operates in the “microwave” portion (2.4GHz and 5GHz), same for Bluetooth. Same for mobile network, which now broadly operates as 4G and 5G. Same for US GPS, Galileo, GLONASS and other geolocating satellital services.
People nowadays use internet to do things. Television and radio became embedded within internet streaming. Governments nowadays use internet to do things. Banks use internet to do things. Commerce use internet to do things. So, they’d be mostly unaffected at the beginning of such phenomenon.
What’d be affected on common people’s lives:
Some types of NFC, so contactless payment would stop working. Non-wireless payments would still work.
Media broadcasting outside cable and internet. Both FM radio station signals and Digital TV station signals would simply vanish.
Remotely locking and unlocking cars will become impossible because car alarm sets mostly operates within 433MHz, which is the “radio” part. Cars will probably be “unlockable” physically by turning keys on their door locks, but they will be noisy as they’d be triggered by the lack of signaled unlocking. Everyone’s cars would go weeeweeeweeweeeweeeweeweeee… in unison as their owners/drivers resorted to their keys to open the doors. Infuriating for everyone, but not something that would “stop” altogether (except, maybe, for some kinds of alarms that wouldn’t allow car ignition to function without proper unlocking, but this is more of an indirect consequence rather than a direct consequence of your “sudden radio wave blackout”).
It’s beyond common people that things would be more affected:
Airplanes would stop communicating with TWR and some of their instruments would stop as well. Their comms happen between 108-137 MHz, which falls into the radio portion. They won’t “fall from the skies”, but accidents would start to happen as the coordination between flights would become impossible and they would need to resort to visual.
Radars of all kinds.
Some trains communicate with the railway control using the radio portion. No more switching rails for trains. Possible train wrecking.
Radio telescopes all around the world (and those in orbit as well) would stop. No more observing the cosmos through radio waves.
Some of the satellite communications that happen below the microwave range.
Weather satellites, it would become impossible for them to do their climate-related operations. Weather forecast would become harder to do without this source of info.
It’s a multifaceted and complex thing to try and imagine everything that would stop working. Modern society has lots of complex technologies, so I probably forgot something above.
In reality, a similar scenario happened a long time ago, at the beginning of the cosmos:
Before being transparent, “light” would not travel further. The era of recombination, which happened when the cosmos was “merely” 380,000 years old, allowed “light” to travel further. This “light” was also radio wave and microwave, and it was part of the white noise back when people still used analog receptor devices, such as radio receptors and analog TV sets. One could still hear it through analog ham radio transceivers and receptors that are still used today, such as Baofeng UV-5R and RTL-SDR dongles connected to a PC.
In your scenario, EM at the radio range wouldn’t propagate, while the rest of the EM frequencies would propagate just fine.
Well, many of the technologies we use in a daily basis are microwave radiation. Access point routers (Wi-fi) operates in the “microwave” portion (2.4GHz and 5GHz), same for Bluetooth. Same for mobile network, which now broadly operates as 4G and 5G. Same for US GPS, Galileo, GLONASS and other geolocating satellital services.
People nowadays use internet to do things. Television and radio became embedded within internet streaming. Governments nowadays use internet to do things. Banks use internet to do things. Commerce use internet to do things. So, they’d be mostly unaffected at the beginning of such phenomenon.
What’d be affected on common people’s lives:
It’s beyond common people that things would be more affected:
It’s a multifaceted and complex thing to try and imagine everything that would stop working. Modern society has lots of complex technologies, so I probably forgot something above.
RF confined to a cable is stil RF though.l