Tech refugee

submitted by [deleted] from self.Introductions

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[–][deleted] 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (5 children)

Well, it's pretty hard to "hook into" the cellular network, and will be triply so when the tower's deisel generator runs out (about 2-3 days, less for many towers). Cellular towers are like giant wifi routers. Think of the connection between the tower and your phone like the connection between your PC and your wifi router. The connection between the tower and the rest of the internet is like the DSL line, cable, or optic line coming out the back of your router and going into the wall. This is the hard part about hooking into cellular networks: the way in is through a fiber optic cable that's part of a larger network. The adapters that connect these fibers to the tower's routers are often expensive and hard to find outside vendor networks, and the software that runs it all is usually proprietary and also not easily obtained. It is all but impossible to jack into a tower at the base without exclusive equipment and esoteric secrets. And you can't just broadcast into the tower via a cellular device, the tower doesn't connect devices, it routes thier traffic to a remote server that handles the connections, the tower only broadcasts and transmits, it's a straight through transmitter.

I don't know where you are obviously, but there is likey a radio repeater network in your area for emergency services and law enforcement, and probably a local ham club repeater too. It used to be mostly older folks on the radio, but younger people are starting to lurk there and speak up some, and a CB radio will bring all sorts of intersting things to you, depending on where you live. It's much, much easier than taking over a tower, that's engineer grade stuff, I don't think it can be done without industry specific tools, good luck getting those without landing on the most horrible watch list ever.

I've worked on cell towers from the top to the bottom, inside and out, from field to National Operations Center. Ok, I didn't work in the NOC but I was on the line with them daily. They are too complex and resource intensive for emergency operations not carried out by thier operators. The fuel required for the distance they broadcast is far more than what radio offers, and there's no such thing as 'repairs on the fly'. You don't fix those components when they fail, you replace them. I had the same idea, take over the cell network when it all goes down, but there's just too much logistics and proprietary systems involved.

[–]bobbobbybob 4 insightful - 2 fun4 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 2 fun -  (4 children)

We have engineers. looking to build a go-to emergency response tech that can be rolled out under emergency response / local and national government systems. i'm in NZ.

We had a failure and none of the existing emergency systems coped. it is like all the people that understand it got old and died.

I feel there is an opening for a new protocol that could be implemented at the operator and local emergency services level. A standard that can be rolled out worldwide for resilience

[–][deleted] 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (3 children)

it is like all the people that understand it got old and died

That's pretty much what happened. If your cellular went down, you need to figure out if it was the towers that ran out of fuel, or the server farms that ran out of power, or both. If the tower is up but no link on the fiber, nogo. If the fiber is good and the tower good but no servers, nogo. You get the picture, it's the emergency infrastructure that keeps all this running that matters. These levels of complication compound quickly without structred support. If you go to a tower that has fuel, and you have a tech who knows that carrier's systems and has an authorization password / CAC / whatever to access and make the changes you want to the tower, you can probably do something, but short of any of those, it's going to be rough.

Better emergency response can be had through HF radios, I think. Keeping a repeater tower running is just easier and more efficient than running cellular towers. And emergency services already have radios in their vehicles. I thouroughly support any efforts to get your cellular networks to better prepare thier sites for disater, but don't overlook radios for emergency use. The hard part is encouraging people you know in the area to buy one.

Ugh, I feel like I wrote that with a chip on my shoulder, I'm still new to radios so I'm no expert.

[–]bobbobbybob 5 insightful - 2 fun5 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 2 fun -  (2 children)

. If your cellular went down,

Fibre optic link to world cut

need some protocol that shifts automagically to an emergency state when main/failover uplinks are lost.

I like radios. I do. But everyone already has a phone.

[–]yetanotherone_sigh 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Most major cell sites have a primary fiber, buried in concrete so that they are backhoe-resistant. If they are really important, they will have a secondary fiber going a different route, so that one singe fiber cut doesn't take the site down. Often this one is not buried at all, but just strung up on a telephone pole. As long as these are still connected to something alive, and everything has power, they work. Some remote tower sites are connected by microwave dishes and daisy-chain several hops to the infrastructure.

[–]bobbobbybob 5 insightful - 2 fun5 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

we are 270km from a city, a single fibre optic link that travels across a fault line. There's lots of PTP airfibre links going in and out of the mountains, but we need something that will work when that fibre is down. an emergency sytem, located at the towers, that can communicate with its other nodes, and elect a boss node when the world is disconnected so that we get more than silence.

This is a software issue, really. some kind of failover routing