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Comment by caleblloyd | Hacker News Reader

Guess what the burglar could also cut the cable line coming into the house to completely disable the internet. Works on every DIY camera with no local storage that only uses home networking.

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Depends on the house. It's not always so simple as snipping the big yellow "cut me" wire.

Aren't most of those cables either buried in the ground, or 12 feet up in the air?

And almost all of them actually enter the house at ground level, often entering the basement around the same place as the main power line does.

Whether it's overhead or underground depends on the house. Usually overhead in older neighborhoods and underground in newer ones.

Telephone lines almost always have an externally accessible demarcation box at ground level (usually a little grey one that says "telephone wiring" on it), making them very easy for a crook to cut. Cable varies a lot, though. It's common for cable to be retrofit into older construction in such a way that the lines are externally accessible, but in newer houses it may have been installed at construction time and well hidden. The cable splitter/distribution amplifier is often in the basement or elsewhere in the house, but is sometimes also installed on the exterior, basically depending on what was easiest to the installer.

So basically, there's almost no common standard for cable. You'll just have to look around. Sometimes the incoming line is lazily run along a fence, sometimes it's buried and all house wiring is internal.

Usually inside a large weatherproof box that says "Comcast" on it.

All of them will go right over to the power meter on the side of the house by law.

Huh? What do you mean? If you only use home networking, then cutting the public internet line doesn't break it.

uses the home network to access the internet, vs having it's own independent internet connection, e.g. via LTE.

Definitely a good point, but we should also be asking (1) is this easier? and (2) If it isn't much, much harder, is it also just sloppy to be giving up more opportunities to risk security and (3) maybe we should re-think the internet lines into the house.

I think most of the comments so far are a play on those points.

That'd also cut off 911 service for VOIP landlines and possibly cell phones with wifi calling enabled.

On T-Mobile at least, I've never been unable to call when my internet connection between router and internet is bad but I'm connected fine to the wifi.

If your cell phone is disconnected from Wifi, wouldn't it just place the 911 call via the cellular radio(s)?

Wifi would be connected. Underlying internet would be dead. So your cell would try to route through the Internet (via the wifi) to no avail.

Try it if you have wifi calling enabled. Just pull the plug on the router and see how long it takes your cell to disable wifi calling.

I use Fi, and it will refuse to call over wifi if the connection is even slightly finicky. If a cell phone tries to place a call over wifi with no internet and then doesn't retry over the cell network I would call that a bug.

Emergency calls normally default to cellular, instead of defaulting to WiFi, as it provides more consistent location information.

Even if it tries wifi first, it should fallback to cellular within 30 seconds if a call attempt is made.

It doesn't try both? A big part of wifi calling is to provide service in what otherwise would be a dead zone.

It doesn't if you have non-cable-based internet.

You don't have 3G fallback on your ADSL modem?

...is this a common feature? I think I've heard of it before, but I don't think I've ever actually seen a ADSL/3G modem in the field...

Usually via a USB connected telco-supplied modem now.

http://www.billion.com/Communication/xDSL%20Series/BiPAC%208...

Great if your business depends on connectivity (e.g. for point of sale).

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