https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/rogers-commun...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Rogers_Communications_out...
Well, their towers were sorta up (as they couldn’t remotely turn them off since the network was down), so if you had a Rogers SIM, a call to 9-1-1 wouldn’t failover to other networks because the device made just enough of a handshake to try and fail on the Rogers network. A flaw in GSM I reckon.
Apparently the workaround was to remove/disable your SIM and hope another network has a stronger signal.
Oh, and the CTO was on holiday and had no idea for a while because… their phone was on roaming with Rogers and therefore dead.
I wonder if Rogers still does planned-in-advance multi-stage potentially-enterprise-breaking updates on Fridays
In trading and market making contexts for instance, we release 100s of times a day — including Fridays. This includes bog-standard infra changes like roleswaps and server rebuilds. The releases that happen on weekends tend to be highly disruptive infra changes, eg unexpected changes to some kind of physical connectivity where we’re not comfortable with carrying weekday risk.
We didn’t explicitly set to to optimise QoL for engineers (the real driver for safe intraday change was being responsive as a business) but not usually being on call on weekends was a big plus.
Either Rogers thinks it can’t make mistakes, or nobody was informed that a potential enterprise breaking change was taking place.
Took some hours to get any official indication from them (partly because of their employees dependency on the service they provide).
> Well, their towers were sorta up (as they couldn’t remotely turn them off since the network was down), so if you had a Rogers SIM, a call to 9-1-1 wouldn’t failover to other networks because the device made just enough of a handshake to try and fail on the Rogers network. A flaw in GSM I reckon.
Didn't know that part, amazing.
It sounds kind of like connecting to a WiFi access point which has a broken/non-working uplink to the Internet. Modern smartphones pretty much automatically detect and avoid such APs, and indeed the whole SSID if they need to, but it sounds like the stuck-in-1985 2G baseband layer has no equivalent connectivity check.
I thought your phone uses all available networks (ie the strongest one) while roaming. Is that not the case?
No. Those are the most densely populated areas of the UK - obviously they appear as bright red spots on the map.
What you have is essentially a population map: https://xkcd.com/1138/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cnvmvqrnq7go
> A spokesperson from BT, which owns EE, apologised and said the firm was "currently addressing an issue impacting our services".
> Vodafone and Three have confirmed to the BBC they do not have network issues.
So I wouldn't expect all that much extra load really.
Isn't that normal for O2? /s
Separate note, but I am astonished by how expensive London is - I can pay engineers Bangalore level salaries but they have to deal with Chicago level CoL.
If the original number range owner has their subscriber database go down, they can't do the lookup for the network to direct the incoming call towards, so it can cause disruption. The same is true if the incoming signalling endpoints are unavailable, as the incoming call requests won't be responded to.
This will happen the day that they try to take Taiwan, worldwide, in my opinion.
they did attack satcom systems to the point of bricking them.
what do you think would happen if you turn off critical infra for a country?
mass civilian death/suffering. military likely hardly affected but extremely motivated...
its counter productive.
So far, this has been only moderately successful in impacting the military, because most of Ukraine's military production is not actually located in Ukraine, and because they've gotten quite good at repairing their electrical grid.
This was generally true of allied strategic bombing campaigns in WWII as well. Simple adaptations like building walls between sections of the plant to require more bombs to attack any given target, hardened shelters for skilled employees, and staging parts outside of the plant enabled some targets to maintain better than 50% uptime during aggressive bombing campaigns. Look into the Oil campaign[1] for more details.
It is interesting to see how precision missiles and cheap drones may change this in the future.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_campaign_of_World_War_II
As an American, I would be more worried about China than Russia though. They makes a lot of our hardware and firmware, giving them plenty of chances to embed killswitches and zero-days. They have possibly the most successful industrial espionage program in the world, giving them the opportunity to find vulns in other systems and embed agents inside critical platforms. They have deeply internalized the concept of fighting where their enemy is weakest not where they are strongest, so they have likely invested in attacking the American military at home rather than on the field.
I think my tin foil hat was askew. There. All better.
The GGP seemed to be ridiculing “those gamers who think their ping is more inportant”, but there is no way for a person to tell if the network limits, or road blocks for that matter, are reasonable or an instance of corruption.
Posting this from a phone on the Three network.
2G,3G,4G,5G?
For voice, is CS down, VoLTE down or both?
Article is not clear on this, but I mainly see voice call complaints?
jon-wood•1d ago
dave78•1d ago
user_7832•1d ago
Human reading > DD reading >> "All our services are operational" when they're absolutely f--ing not.
jon-wood•15h ago
whalesalad•1d ago
avalys•1d ago
“Smart” doesn’t have to mean complex and technically sophisticated.
teeray•1d ago
1970-01-01•1d ago
nailer•1d ago
viraptor•1d ago
ElijahLynn•1d ago
NitpickLawyer•1d ago