Tech refugee

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[–][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