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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

If Whatsapp is replacing radio equipment in the trains and does a satisfactory job, then it should 100% become the official way to do it.

The 'proper' solution of new radios on the train and all the associated ground infrastructure installation cost could be really expensive (think millions of dollars). Yet just giving each driver a data plan would only cost thousands of dollars.

The whatsapp solution is so much cheaper because the infrastructure (4G towers) is already installed for passengers of the train, the network is already run for citizens of the country, and the software work is already done by Whatsapp for their other 1.1 Billion users.

Whatsapp isn't a 'cheap' solution. It's the very expensive solution where the cost has already been paid for by a billion other people, so, as long as it meets the needs of the subway, it is the cheap solution.

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Until whatsapp dies. Subway systems run for decades. Can anyone really trust that any particular app will still be around in twenty years? Or two? For critical infrastructure you need something stable, something like a part of the RF spectrum dedicated to critical infrastructure. This is why cops/pilots/ships still have dedicated radios even though some combination of cell/satellite phones would certainly be much cheaper in the short term.

Huge amounts of the world de facto run on WhatsApp, including essential services like healthcare, emergency services, finance, etc. WhatsApp going down or shutting down is already an enormous threat.

That may be true, but from an engineering perspective it's unwise to build a two-story house on a sand foundation just because the rest of the neighborhood has done so.

Sure, but you can say that about most solutions, especially organic bottom-up solutions, like the internet, while neglecting the upsides of it being bottom-up and organic like this system's ability to come up with its own fixes just-in-time instead of waiting for top-down decree.

FWIW, telco companies in Mexico don't charge for WhatsApp data transfer. As for prices, a 30 day Telcel 4.5GB plan is 200 pesos ($10) per month. So long as you don't use up the data doing things outside of WhatsApp, like surfing the web, which will expire the plan, then you get free WhatsApp (and Instagram and most social media) transfer for the month.

So it's not the worst organic solution and it's not even obvious how to centralize a better solution. For example, how many subway drivers are there and how much govt bureaucracy would be needed to do something like give everyone a $10 stipend for WhatsApp? Even giving each driver an extra $10 pesos per month wouldn't change anything.

People will just switch to signal or whatever. It's easily mitigated.

> Until whatsapp dies. Subway systems run for decades. Can anyone really trust that any particular app will still be around in twenty years? Or two? For critical infrastructure you need something stable, something like a part of the RF spectrum dedicated to critical infrastructure. This is why cops/pilots/ships still have dedicated radios even though some combination of cell/satellite phones would certainly be much cheaper in the short term.

The radios of those are outside. The radios of subway are underground. It's not great for radios, requires infrastructure, and phones solve it in same way, by having infrastructure close to cover for reduced range.

Well, they're using dedicated radios now and they're broken so that's clearly not a solution. So when WhatsApp breaks, you just say "Okay, we're using DopeyMsg, the new messaging tool everyone is using" or whatever.

>Until whatsapp dies. Subway systems run for decades.

Then you upgrade? There's nothing that precludes that the bespoke system won't die and by the looks of it the current system has already died leading to the use of Whatsapp.

> Until whatsapp dies.

it wouldn't be that expensive to make your own app that sends and receives messages over 4g.

Right, foolish Meta paid $19.0 billion for it when they could’ve had an intern hack it up on the weekend

Switch to telegram when whtsapp dies or one of the gazillion alternatives.

> If Whatsapp is replacing radio equipment in the trains and does a satisfactory job, then it should 100% become the official way to do it.

WhatsApp is consumer-grade software. Using it to manage a transport system is like using a $50 home-oriented manual espresso machine in a busy cafe instead of a proper commercial unit with automatic grinding, multiple nozzles, and a support agreement in place.

When it comes to software, consumer grade software used and tested by a billion people is always going to be more reliable than some niche commercial grade software created by a contractor.

That assessment doesn't fit the reputation of the software that runs in most government departments including public transportation departments

It might be 'consumer-grade' but man is it well designed. I consider it one of my aspirations to write software as robust as Whatsapp. Sometimes I sit in my cube looking at my utter mess of an Angular app that I develop for a few thousand concurrent users and think, man how the hell am I ever going to get anywhere as close to as how good something like Whatsapp is.

The reason its so good is how it handles edge cases. it brilliantly handles edge cases like when connection is extremely spotty. In 2015 when I was backpacking around Europe I learned this the hard way when iMessage repeatedly hit issues where it would get stuck transmitting mid message and would require drastic things like rebooting the iPhone (because that damn status bar gets stuck and then you have no recourse) whereas no matter how slow/spotty the connection (like 64kb/s or slower), Whatsapp would patiently work and reliably get the transmission through eventually.

In hindsight, I am thankful Zuckerberg had the sense to acquire them. He has so far done a lot less to destroy it than I expected. Can you imagine if they got acquired by some garbage dump of a company like Oracle, or Salesforce, or (shudders) Google? Just think of all the ways they would have ruined it.

Yeah, I'm actually surprised about the lack of destruction too. May it long continue, since I'm not looking forward to migrating my family to a different messenger app.

WhatsApp is incredibly reliable.

Except for the times that it goes down globally, yes.

You should see russian pilots in Ukraine using consumer-grade GPS devices for navigation then.

Russian military's equipment in Ukraine is legendarily bad. The comparison should really be against what the American army uses for GPS.

People might say "it clearly doesn't meet the needs of the railway. it isn't reliable enough".

Those people might be right. But I'd like to point to the old solution, the radios in the trains, which are in the middle of a decade long outage right now. It's more reliable than that.

And this stuff isn't safety critical - in-cab radios are mostly used for logistics. Everything from scheduling shifts to getting trains to wait a few extra minutes to even out gaps in the service. Without it, the service wouldn't run so smoothly. But it could still run.

I would prefer to not give facebook even more power.

It sounds to me like WhatsApp is being used for safety-critical stuff:

> Previously, each train could automatically identify its proximity to another one. “It is designed to stop so trains don’t collide,” said Pérez Varela. Now, human operators, who had initially been hired as a fail-safe to manually halt a train if the automatic pilot failed, need to intervene more often. Trains usually run at 70 kilometers per hour, but when the autopilot signals that it is not working, operators must take immediate action to manually reduce the speed to 35 kilometers per hour to avoid derailment. > > Since the trains are increasingly manually driven, real-time communication among operators is essential. “We are all provided with a radio but it doesn’t work properly,” Jaime, an operator who has worked at the Metro for 17 years, told Rest of World on condition of anonymity. “That’s why we started using our cellphones.”

That reads to me like they need communication to ensure they don't run into the rear of the train ahead.

You're ignoring the hidden costs of relying on a free, third-party, web-based service for your critical communication network.

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