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Comment by petesergeant | Hacker News Reader

Whenever I read stuff about telecoms security, I realize the first few weeks of any serious war will just be complete loss of cell service.

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Depends. Ukraine, despite some service interruptions, still largely has cell service:

https://www.euronews.com/next/2024/03/25/ukraines-telecom-en...

I think these networks can be a lot more resilient than we think and they can be maintained even during a war.

Meanwhile in Russia, mobile data shutdowns are becoming a routine. Especially in regions closer to the border/front line. They say it's to fight drone attacks, but no word on how effective that actually is.

Drones just use onboard fiber spools these days, so the mobile shutdowns don't change much.

That's the short-distance FPV drones used near the front line. The long-distance ones, the kinds that strike hundreds of kilometers deep, fly pre-programmed routes afaik but also use mobile networks for something. Maybe intelligence collection, maybe so an operator could take over.

The cell network is one of the best surveillance tools we've ever built as humanity, as well as a network of location beacons when over friendly territory. Taking it down would strongly limit the amount of information that can be gathered both passively and actively. Modern 5G networks can even act as radar.

A technically capable terrorist could wreak havoc if they could get access to the control center of a telecoms network, but I don't think service will be down for extended periods of times unless it's part of a scorched earth strategy of some kind. Any military operation can be disrupted easily with cheap and widely available jammers anyway, attacking cellular infrastructure is mostly useful for attacking civilian targets and spreading panic.

You should specify what you mean by radar. If you mean for missile defense, one problem is that they use directional antennas aimed largely at the ground, which should make it useless for detecting an incoming missile.

And yet here I sit at my desk in my home with 1 bar of service, and I think that's only because 0 bars is not possible. It's not like they'd have to do much to disrupt cell service

Depends on your phone and coverage. I've seen zero bars and apparently connected. More often I see zero bars and not connected, usually has a line through the signal indicator.

Where I live, there's resistance to adding new towers, so our dead zones are pretty consistent. One part of town has very spotty coverage from all networks, but has some wifi that works a bit. Otherwise, there's a couple places where network B has no coverage, and others where network C doesn't. Last I tried, network A was hopeless at my house, but I assume it still has holes in the coverage.

And you won’t be able to drive your cell network connected car… making logistics impossible. It’s a big enough wartime issue there ought to be a regulation that the cell device should be able to be “pulled” and the car defaults to “fully enabled”.

Do you have examples of cars (that aren't Teslas, perhaps, since they don't play by normal car rules) having been disabled due to lack of cell service?

Not to avoid the question, because I simply don't know, but do you (or anyone) have directions on how to yank a cell module from a list of cars and still have the car function?

Here's an example for a Tacoma https://www.tacoma4g.com/forum/threads/disabling-dcm-telemat...

Many cars have something similar (remove SIM card, cut antenna) that allows them to keep working without connectivity

Would be nice to have a page full of forum posts like this for various cars.

Incidentally, this link recommends termination resistors, which I think are the better answer if there's a suitable connector (which I imagine is the case for most cars). If it's not terminated, I believe it can still pick up a nontrivial signal.

If things like Starlink Cellular work properly, will probably help prevent that.

Doesn't Starlink depend on ground stations? So toss a couple of missiles at those ground stations, and Starlink isn't as useful.

If it has ground stations all around the world, the satellites can use direct connections between each other to generate a mesh network and find a working path.

Depends on who the invader is. If it's America going after yet another country in the Middle East, Starlink Cellular certainly won't help.

> Depends on who the invader is

And probably how Elon is feeling that day about the participants

Why would Starlink be more resilient against hacks than ground-based LTE?

It is my understanding that Starlink does not do home-grown crypto of the 3GPP-kind. Also because it is closed ecosystem there is no need for SIMs and the associated deployment mechanisms.

Their "direct to cell" service is a regular LTE network, so it must be using all the same protocols in order to be compatible with existing devices.

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