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Comment by tinus_hn | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile the rest of the world has moved on to digital, encrypted communication.

Mobile phones continue to work during a disaster as long as the base station batteries hold out and that’s with cheap base stations serving very large amounts of idiot users using the cheapest of the cheap handsets limited by regulations. Why wouldn’t you be able to make this work indefinitely with a limited amount of trained users using selected, powerful expensive handsets.

In other words, a bunch of poor excuses made by coincidentally those same people who love to profess that privacy doesn’t matter as long as it’s someone else’s privacy.

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Agreed about privacy, but the "Mobile phones continue to work during a disaster" is a very optimistic view.

It was no a disaster, far from it. In Belgium, few years ago, a fire under a bridge broke an bunch of fibers from the main telco operator.

Result on a region of about 200,000 inhabitants:

  - no radio (on my usual station), first thing I noted that morning.
  - no internet
  - no TV (comes via internet)
  - no cell phone coverage
  - no land-line either
  - emergency calls impossible (by cell-phone or land-line)

This started early in the morning and was only solved in the afternoon for most people. We are over-reliant on some technology with many single point of failure we do not even know about.

That sounds insane. Any network other than very basic ones should have physical redudancy, ie. not being in the same duct or even travelling close to eachother. Hell, our local MAN network here does it! Thats in a city with 130k inhabitants, they actually made the network backbone out of redundant rings.

I would hope most telco networks would be somewhat resilient.

A former employer of mine tried to have redundant connections. They had two fibers from two different providers, going separate paths from their Dallas office, etc. However, the 2nd provider utilized a 3rd provider as a regional carrier. And for about 100 miles between Dallas and Chicago, the fibers were run in conduits that were side by side. We discovered that when a single backhoe took down phones, data, etc, to all our southeast Region offices. (it also affected many others). Found out the hard way, that the 2nd providers redundant uplink also went through the same connection. Good luck tracing your fibers all the way from end to end.. Most of this stuff is all contracted to 3rd parties, and most don't want to give you detailed maps.

Companies often sell services to each other, too. So what you think is a redundant connection may just be a link on the same fiber, resold.

I heard in this case, both Proximus and Telenet, the main operators in Belgium, run their fibers in the same conduit. So every company thought they were redundant by buing both, but weren't.

I also heard the railways are the main fiber provider: They have long stretches of rail between all major cities, so they are ideal for fiber. But very bad for redundancy

> - no radio (on my usual station), first thing I noted that morning.

I imagine that's internet radio? That couldn't be normal AM/FM radio.

Normal AM/FM radio still needs a way to send the audio data to the transmitter. Either the studio was in the region and their internet uplink was affected, or the local transmitter was using the internet to receive the audio feed.

It was FM radio, and I think the studio sends its data to the antenna using some internet link, which was down.

> Mobile phones continue to work during a disaster ...

Except when you go over your Verizon bandwidth limit.

That's for data. This conversation is about voice communication.

This is in reference to a specific incident last year where fire fighters operations were impacted because their service plan inadvertently was setup with a monthly limit.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/verizon-throttle...

Point stands. "Emergencies are a terrible time for an upsell" is not something I thought would be controversial, but building systems in which one has to have permission to communicate in an emergency is a recipe for people dying.

Which is why emergency phone calls can be made anywhere you have coverage in the U.S. or Canada, whether or not your subscription is current.

>Meanwhile the rest of the world has moved on to digital, encrypted communication.

It's happening slowly in the US. Biggest reason it's slow is "defense/law enforcement" suppliers and their markups for the industry which add cost and causes departments to delay as long as they can until someone ponies up the money. Not to mention there is new IT overhead in managing the configuration on said radios and while bigger agencies have the internal team to do it, smaller agencies don't have that benefit.

Unlike say France where there is one singular police force that can share resources, in the US there's hundreds of them in just one state. Don't get me started about ambulances. Because this is #amerika, there are thousands of private ambulance services. Getting them on board with encrypted comm isn't really going to work given they begrudgingly paying most EMTs minimum wage.

>Mobile phones continue to work during a disaster as long as the base station batteries hold out and that’s with cheap base stations serving very large amounts of idiot users

Maybe? There are numerous accounts of inoperable service when incidents like 9/11 or the Boston bombing occurred. So in cases where the system is flooded, it might be a crap shoot.

The only way this would work is with dedicated frequency and possibly infrastructure, similar to FirstNet.

Mobile phones are not reliable for natural disaster situations, because of channel loading characteristic on the control channel, LTE may survive better.

> Mobile phones continue to work during a disaster as long as the base station batteries hold out and that’s with cheap base stations serving very large amounts of idiot users using the cheapest of the cheap handsets limited by regulations.

Why "idiot"? Are they idiots for using cheap handsets? I really can't tell why you added that word.

There's a need for comm that works without middlemen that can predictably fail.

Like Amateur Radio Emergency Service (ARES)?

http://www.arrl.org/ares

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