23 ms·

Europe braces for mobile network blackouts

183 points by lxm 4y ago

raverbashing 4y ago
That seems like a stretch Mobile stations are usually very well prepared for power redundancy
- _trampeltier 4y ago
  Not as far, I know here in Europe. Why should they. For sure, they have batterys for one hour or so. But there is no second electric connection, to a diffrent electric grid. Something like that does not really exist, because our electric grid was not planed in mind for a such situation.
  - izacus 4y ago
    Most main base stations have diesel generators, not second power grid.
    - bobbob1921 4y ago
      Or if like in USA commonly are fueled by natural gas infrastructure, or propane in a tank (as well as the Diesel, althou that is less common)
    - chinathrow 4y ago
      I am not so sure if this is true for mobile base stations in Europe e.g. in cities, mounted on roofs of e.g. a church or another building roof.
    - Semaphor 4y ago
      When we had a 6h power outage a few years ago in my city in Germany, mobile services were completely down as well.
    - _trampeltier 4y ago
      Have you ever seen an antenna on a roof somewhere with a diesel generator?
      - jcampbell1 4y ago
        There is T-Mobile equipment on my building. They are connected to the diesel generator circuit (shared with the elevator) and have battery backup.
nivenkos 4y ago
- bitcharmer 4y ago
  So appeasement then? Please show one example when cowering to the bully actually solved the issue.
- COGlory 4y ago
  You can surely argue that it's not worth the cost in good faith, but there's no way you can describe an invasion and demands of territorial annexation as "reasonable" and still be taken seriously.
  - leesalminen 4y ago
    I believe the parent was referring to Russia’s demand that the west agree to deny Ukraine membership to NATO and/or EU now and in the future. I’m not an expert on this though, that was just the impression I got. I don’t think anyone could say what’s happened since Feb is “reasonable”.
    - Huh1337 4y ago
      How is that request in any way reasonable? It's an independent, sovereign state. Would Russia listen to any such requests or deem them reasonable?
      - pessimizer 4y ago
        Make the case that it's unreasonable to not want Soviet nukes in Cuba.
        Huh1337 4y ago
        Apples and oranges. US is not and never was plundering Cuba, unlike Russians who plunder every single state in their sphere of influence until nothing is left. This is not about some nukes on Cuba, this is about living like a normal person and not in a corrupt, fascist despotism where you die decades prematurely and nobody cares.
maxsilver 4y ago
A typical cell tower uses 4kW to 5kW, sometimes less (at least in the states). That's reasonably close to a standard home's central air conditioner, or a home's electric stove/oven/range. I'd be highly surprised if, of all possible things, this is where they want to cut to lower electricity usage.
- giantg2 4y ago
  My understanding is that many have supplemental power options, or at least the ability to be hooked up to a mobile one.
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    I wouldn't worry about powering the cell tower itself, but more about the backhaul infrastructure that it relies on. In cities it relies on fiber that's often leased from various providers and terminates at datacenters where it shares switching equipment with a lot of other customers of the provider & datacenter, so power can't effectively be segregated. If that datacenter can't be kept powered (and that will require a lot of power), it doesn't matter whether the tower itself remains powered.
- gpvos 4y ago
  Indeed, not particularly, but they will just lose power together with the buildings around them.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  Load shedding occurs in larger regions of the grid. The utilities don’t have the ability to turn specific sites on and off at random throughout the day.
  - Scoundreller 4y ago
    They can with smartmeters
- alex_duf 4y ago
  I think it's more about the cell towers being cut at the same time as their local area. Where it's easy to anticipate that hospitals/police stations/fire birgades will need a special connection to the grid, it probably was harder 20 years ago to realise the numerous new cell towers also needed to be put on a separate connection. So they'll get cut at the same time as the companies and the houses in the local area.
doix 4y ago
I've been in South Africa for the last month, which has had an energy crisis since around 2007 and somehow they manage to keep mobile networks up during load shedding. There are 2:30 hour (sometimes 4:30 hour) blackouts daily and yet everything seems to keep chugging along. Mobile towers are probably have some of the highest electricity:benefit ratios out there, it would be silly to not prioritize them.
- tapland 4y ago
  In Sweden we haven’t separated their power supply from anything else, so rolling blackouts will kill them as well. And the blackouts are probably coming sooner than a fix can be in place
  - dijit 4y ago
    I actually had a problem with Swedens approach a few years ago. The Swedish power grid is a single grid and the idea is: all eggs in one basket, but pay close attention to the basket. Unfortunately when it comes to datacenter designations, two independent power feeds is required for tier 2 and above. Excluding all datacenters in Sweden. At least some portions of Canada are also excluded because they have rules that say that only hospitals are allowed to have two independent power feeds. So Ubisofts Montreal Datacenter is in the same building as a hospital...
    - gerikson 4y ago
      How does that work in for example the US? The Texas grid is separate from the rest of the continent, no?
      - lostapathy 4y ago
        You can connect to separate energy providers - such that if one provider or their transmission infrastructure goes down, you're still connected to and online with the other provider.
      - zinekeller 4y ago
neonsunset 4y ago
Imagine using easily expendable and non-renewable resources, subjecting the very processes our civilization is sustained by to a great risk of failure while having an almost inexhaustible source of energy that was invented more than 50 years ago. Surely that would be a madness and no reasonable organization would do this, right?
- fsh 4y ago
  According to IAEA data, there is considerably more minable coal than uranium on earth (by extractible energy). Current nuclear reactors are not scalable to global energy requirements.
  - neonsunset 4y ago
  - Ruthalas 4y ago
    Is that "more" by mass, or energy content?
    - fsh 4y ago
      Energy content of course. Uranium contains quite some energy, but it is also extremely rare. Without breeders, it would be exhausted in a few years.
- dopidopHN 4y ago
  Is the inexhaustible uranium in your comment? I’m unclear. Uranium is fine. But it’s totally exhaust-able.
TrackerFF 4y ago
Mobile networks should of course be classified as critical infrastructure, and thus be exempt from any rolling blackouts.
- blueflow 4y ago
  They already are. The article is just sensationalist. And from all providers, they picked Deutsche Telekom, which is like the provider with the worst reputation in terms of reliability and service. Of course the german internet is in shambles if you ask DTAG... because theirs is.
  - Semaphor 4y ago
    > which is like the provider with the worst reputation in terms of reliability and service Every other provider would like a word with you. I don’t even think there’s a good one outside tiny ones.
    - blueflow 4y ago
      Intentional superlative, DTAG is the worst, it doesn't say the others are good. It just says they are less bad.
- gpvos 4y ago
  Too little time to implement that before the winter. Mobile phones used to be supplemental to the old fixed phone network, which is on separate power.
giantg2 4y ago
My first thought was actually that this was concerning EMP or radiological issues if Putin goes nuclear.
- Kye 4y ago
  If Europe's power systems are anything like those in the US, Russia hopefully wouldn't risk a cascade failure going all the way to Russia with an EMP.
  - gpvos 4y ago
    Europe's are actually a bit more robust, like the article says. But still far from invulnerable.
    - giantg2 4y ago
      I was thinking more about the electronics associate with the towers and handsets.
izacus 4y ago
I strongly strongly doubt that critical emergency call infrastructure will be blacked out before literally anything else. Even when massive ice buildup took down a whole region's power grid in my home EU country, mobile cell towers were the first to be kept up and brought online to allow emergency services and citizens to communicate. This feels like a nothing burger from Reuters (which is publishing some seriously dubious news these days).
- Kye 4y ago
  The general vibe of quotes from governments/operators in the article is they intend to find ways to keep essential services running in the event outages last longer than a couple of hours.
- gpvos 4y ago
  Indeed, they will just black out together with everything else. They are generally not on separate distribution circuits. They do have some limited backup power though.
  - izacus 4y ago
    The ones I was helping deploy usually had generators as backup because the requirements from the government was that emergency call infrastructure works when power goes out. I can see smaller network operators save money on backups, but major monopolies usually don't have a choice in this manner. So I wonder which regions don't do that?
    - gpvos 4y ago
      As far as I know the Netherlands doesn't. But I don't work in that industry.
    - bismuthcrystal 4y ago
      For how long can these generators run?
sschueller 4y ago
Mobile networks are considered essential. They will be the last thing to be turned off. I would expect trains to stop running first and businesses having their power cut before any cell tower would be affected. I would also like the point out that network operators have mobile cell towers they can deploy and do deploy during large crowd events. These run for hours on diesel. This is sensationalist journalism trying to sell papers. Every paper will be reprinting this in their language as they do for many reuters articles. Irresponsible IMO just like the weekly nuclear holocaust headlines because of that reactor in Ukraine. How about we educate the public instead of printing garbage headlines?
chriscappuccio 4y ago
Lots of people here seem to echo the idea that there is a way to prioritize cellular towers. That's up to whoever runs then. The power goes off for everyone in the area. They need to have enough batteries and generator capacity. Many sites have no generators and battery capacity will vary. Some carriers try to have a week or two of battery capacity but that isn't practical at small sites. When power starts going off, the towers will be prioritized through alternate power sources maintained by the carriers or their contractors.
FollowingTheDao 4y ago
My serious question: Is this a way for the EU nations to quell public uprisings from fuel shortages by limiting network communications while not taking the blame for it?
- amalter 4y ago
  No. They are talking about limited disruptions to limited areas due to planned load shedding. If your power and phone are out for 4-6 hours - is that going to suppress your ability to protest? I know I'm not supposed to do this, but is this "concern trolling"? I can't see how you could get from A->B unless you're trying to rabble rouse?
  - FollowingTheDao 4y ago
    I got from A -> B because https://www.wionews.com/photos/in-pics-protests-across-europe-over-energy-crisis-513394#uk-513390 https://www.wionews.com/photos/in-pics-protests-across-europ... https://carnegieendowment.org/2022/03/31/government-internet-shutdowns-are-changing.-how-should-citizens-and-democracies-respond-pub-86687 https://carnegieendowment.org/2022/03/31/government-internet... It is not a fault, but a virtue to be suspicious of governments during times of protest. Does a 4 hour black out slow down protests? Probably not, but it does not stop countries like India from constantly doing so: https://therecord.media/governments-intentionally-shut-down-internet-182-times-across-34-countries-in-2021-report/ https://therecord.media/governments-intentionally-shut-down-... Planting narratives in the media is not an unusual agency tactic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_influence_on_public_opinion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_influence_on_public_opinio...
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
I see a lot of confusion in the comments about why cell towers would be impacted. Load shedding in the grid occurs across regions of the grid. The power companies don’t choose which specific sites to cut off. If cellular infrastructure is in part of the grid that gets disconnected, it will go down too (after exhausting its backup supply). The top priority for keeping power on goes to grid segments with life-sustaining equipment. If you live within a grid segment that also powers a hospital you will likely not be subject to load shedding.
- alibert 4y ago
  Indeed, a large part of cell towers are hosted on the rooftop of residential buildings and mostly connected to the same electrical network. In France, most homes have a smartmeter (called "Linky") and these could be used to have very precise load shedding (they communicate with PLC) but I believe this feature is not available or developed (yet?).
- myself248 4y ago
  The critical detail is that the batteries are configured for standby service, not cycling service, which means that they don't recharge quickly when power comes back on. They're set to a float voltage which maximizes battery service life (years), at the expense of cycle time (hours). The first time power cuts, you might have 8-10 hours to run on battery. But if it comes back on and then goes off again just a few hours later, the batteries might've only recovered 3 hours of charge. Increasing the recharge rate wouldn't be technically complicated (just adjust the rectifier output), but it would have a logistical cost: These rectifiers aren't designed to be fiddled with so it would take a bit of skill, and someone with that skill would have to visit every site. Worse, by boosting the rectifier voltage, the batteries would then fail faster, as commensurate with cycling rather than standby service. A site that normally gets 10 years on its battery plant might need new batteries every 3 years, for instance. That's a bad deal. (And no, the rectifiers simply are not set up to do multi-stage charging. That would add a bunch of coordination and complexity that's just not needed in standby service where they can output a simple float voltage and be done with it. Changing that would be a forklift upgrade, replacing the simple rectifiers with complex chargers.) It's reasonable that new sites may be installed with lithium batteries someday instead of lead-acid, and that may already be occurring in some places, and that would solve the problem quite simply because lithium just has such higher charge acceptance rates. You can float-charge a lithium and still use it in cycling service because it absorbs charge much more readily even on float. Lead-acids charge incredibly slowly on float, which is fine in a standby application, but it might be the Achilles' heel here.
rad_gruchalski 4y ago
I live at a Germany/Belgium border, and have no mobile service sometimes for days. So yeah, whatever…
londons_explore 4y ago
This won't happen - instead big users will be told to shut down completely.
scifibestfi 4y ago
This will be amazing advertising for Starlink.
- mrtksn 4y ago
  You should check out how much power the Starlink base station requires. It's one of its main issues.
  - scifibestfi 4y ago
    You just need a phone and network that uses it. https://www.t-mobile.com/news/un-carrier/t-mobile-takes-coverage-above-and-beyond-with-spacex https://www.t-mobile.com/news/un-carrier/t-mobile-takes-cove...
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - james_pm 4y ago
      And a few years until it actually exists. "starting with a beta in select areas by the end of next year after SpaceX’s planned satellite launches". On Elon time, that's 2025 and perhaps never.
scifibestfi 4y ago
"Russia's decision to halt gas supplies via Europe's key supply route in the wake of the Ukraine conflict has increased the chances of power shortages." Europe's decision, Germany especially, to be reliant on Russia for energy when they could have not shut down nuclear plants and built more.
- j-pb 4y ago
  - stingraycharles 4y ago
    Not trying to argue with you, just trying to understand as someone from a neighboring country — could you elaborate a bit more about what happened with the Conservative Party undermining the green energy effort? And how close would Germany realistically have been to being completely self-sufficient by now if that didn’t happen?
    - throw827474737 4y ago
      Blocking wind power and grid efforts everywhere, stopping planned storage efforts, man we even shut down pump storages etc over the last decades that would be so necessary to have any chance to support and realize base load with renewables. Right now we are shedding cheap bio gas and wind power production again (and that given we build up much too little as we could have) while the power stock exchanges have fun gambling. On top this constant nuclear narrative, which is not even much significant for current power production, this is all beyond any funny. Google translate those for few alternstive povs: https://www.klimareporter.de/strom/deutschland-fackelt-gas-ab https://www.klimareporter.de/strom/deutschland-fackelt-gas-a... https://www.makawind.de/index.php?show=news https://www.makawind.de/index.php?show=news https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_Pumpspeicherkraftwerken#Aufgegebene_Projekte https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_Pumpspeicherkraftw...
      - chess_buster 4y ago
        Oh yeah, I forgot. All of that, too. And this is the look of the politician in question https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/35/Peter_Altmaier_Portrait.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/35/Peter_Al...
ajross 4y ago
This headline is awful. There's nothing specific to "mobile networks" in this news at all. They're saying that there's a potential energy crisis and that it might impact phones. ...which is also just plain ridiculous! Phone service is a critical piece of infrastructure and in almost all markets subject to special treatment and provided with redundant power mechanisms. Lots of things may break this winter. Phones won't be one of them.
Aloha 4y ago
I'm a former field engineer for a US Cellular carrier. I don't understand how a two hour outage is a panic event, both Cellular CO's and Cell Sites should have at least 3-4 hours of holdover time. Thats just the standard of design. Like, what happens if I storm blows thru, knocks down the infrastructure, if you have heat related infrastructure failures, or some other just normal failure - power outages happen, for those sites in the states where long power outages are common they'll have a permanent generator on site.
- myself248 4y ago
  Same here and likewise baffled. TFA says: > Europe has nearly half a million telecom towers and most of them have battery backups that last around 30 minutes to run the mobile antennas. Which seems bonkers to me. Perhaps they deploy incredibly small batteries because they're engineered for a different outage profile than the US? Or perhaps the reporter is quoting something inappropriately -- traditional large sites with many hours, and many new small sites with no backup at all, might well average out to 30 minutes. I think there's real work to be done on improving bring-up time when power returns, though. I worked on the EVDO rollout and rebooting a site after work would take 20-30 minutes because it's something that's only expected to happen once in a blue moon. I believe if they relaxed GPS timing tolerances a bit and optimized a few other things, this could be shortened to 5-ish minutes without a whole lot of work.
  - Aloha 4y ago
    The Samsung gear I worked on would take about 10 min to come back up, give or take. I know because I dropped a handful of sites when I did power testing - visual inspection was not always enough to verify if the power was wired correctly. Most of them came back up in 10 min.. well, except once there was one site that didn't come back because the Microwave didn't like the power hit, lol - that required another tower crew to revisit and hang a new RRU. I just can't imagine power design is that different, I'm used to these cabinets even in urban areas having 4 strings of batteries in them, are they only building sites with a single string in europe?
  - 9dev 4y ago
antonymy 4y ago
So it's not turning off mobile networks in particular, it's just a general power shortage, a consequence of which might be some cell service being interrupted. They made it sound like they were going to shut off mobile networks specifically to save power, which doesn't make sense for a couple of reasons. Starting to feel like Reuters isn't worth my time anymore. Too many clickbaity titles like this lately.
- toyg 4y ago
  I was reading the other day that they've made dramatic cuts in most of their local offices, and their material is now largely produced in a central hub in a low-cost Eastern European country. It shows.
  - throwie_wayward 4y ago
    they're running a business, after all.
pier25 4y ago
In Mexico power cuts are so frequent that most (probably all) cell towers have batteries that last for an hour or two. It's rare that power cuts last so long, usually it's like 10-15 mins, but I've experienced 3-4 hours cuts a couple of times over the years. When I lived in Cancún these were more frequent though, because AC consuming so much power during summer.
masswerk 4y ago
Seeing `&` on a page like Reuters is quite a throwback to the 1990s. There's actually something soothing about the imperfect exposing the "stroke" of the underlying media. :-)
torcete 4y ago
USA is using and destroying Europe in its proxy war against Russia.
- vkou 4y ago
  It's a little bit more complicated than that, much of Eastern Europe is also happy to both make and hop into that bed.
- _-david-_ 4y ago
  Maybe Europe should take responsibility for reckless energy policies over multiple decades?
zanethomas 4y ago
Easily predictable, and predicted, unintended consequence.
DoingIsLearning 4y ago
Vodafone Portugal suffered an extremely successful cyber attack in February 2022, taking down: - 4G - 5G - Fixed voice - Digital TV - SMS - voice It took _several_ days to bring everything back online. [0] No Ransomware requests issued, most likely a state actor. Many people speculate the attack was a training ground for Russian cyberwarfare. I find this a much more likely failure mode for communications (including emergency services) than network operators not managing uptime because of blackouts. [0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/02/vodafone-portugal-struggles-to-restore-service-following-cyberattack/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/02/vodaf...
TacticalCoder 4y ago
I can understand why that'd happen. Where I live, in France atm, there's one cell tower around. And when it's down, it's down. I know because in June there have been one hour of electrical blackout about once a week and, well, our smartphones weren't working anymore. I don't even bother with an UPS or a 4G router for my network: when there's no electricity, nothing is working anymore anyway. Stuff that keeps working for a few hours: the Kindle, tablet and local files on the laptops. So there's that.
- Scoundreller 4y ago
  Your station météo should be good for a few months until the batteries go out, so at least there’s that.
voidr 4y ago
This is extremely irresponsible, how are you supposed to make a call if you have an emergency? People are going to die. The EU needs to recognise the situation: this is not working, 15% of Ukraine is now part of Russia despite all the NATO help. Meanwhile the US is laughing as the dollar is rising above everything and the media is un-ironically saying that it could have been the US who blew up the pipelines in the Baltic Sea.

183 points by lxm 4y ago

raverbashing 4y ago

That seems like a stretch Mobile stations are usually very well prepared for power redundancy

_trampeltier 4y ago
Not as far, I know here in Europe. Why should they. For sure, they have batterys for one hour or so. But there is no second electric connection, to a diffrent electric grid. Something like that does not really exist, because our electric grid was not planed in mind for a such situation.
- izacus 4y ago
  Most main base stations have diesel generators, not second power grid.
  - bobbob1921 4y ago
    Or if like in USA commonly are fueled by natural gas infrastructure, or propane in a tank (as well as the Diesel, althou that is less common)
  - chinathrow 4y ago
    I am not so sure if this is true for mobile base stations in Europe e.g. in cities, mounted on roofs of e.g. a church or another building roof.
  - Semaphor 4y ago
    When we had a 6h power outage a few years ago in my city in Germany, mobile services were completely down as well.
  - _trampeltier 4y ago
    Have you ever seen an antenna on a roof somewhere with a diesel generator?
    - jcampbell1 4y ago
      There is T-Mobile equipment on my building. They are connected to the diesel generator circuit (shared with the elevator) and have battery backup.

nivenkos 4y ago

bitcharmer 4y ago
So appeasement then? Please show one example when cowering to the bully actually solved the issue.
COGlory 4y ago
You can surely argue that it's not worth the cost in good faith, but there's no way you can describe an invasion and demands of territorial annexation as "reasonable" and still be taken seriously.
- leesalminen 4y ago
  I believe the parent was referring to Russia’s demand that the west agree to deny Ukraine membership to NATO and/or EU now and in the future. I’m not an expert on this though, that was just the impression I got. I don’t think anyone could say what’s happened since Feb is “reasonable”.
  - Huh1337 4y ago
    How is that request in any way reasonable? It's an independent, sovereign state. Would Russia listen to any such requests or deem them reasonable?
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      Make the case that it's unreasonable to not want Soviet nukes in Cuba.
      - Huh1337 4y ago
        Apples and oranges. US is not and never was plundering Cuba, unlike Russians who plunder every single state in their sphere of influence until nothing is left. This is not about some nukes on Cuba, this is about living like a normal person and not in a corrupt, fascist despotism where you die decades prematurely and nobody cares.

maxsilver 4y ago

A typical cell tower uses 4kW to 5kW, sometimes less (at least in the states). That's reasonably close to a standard home's central air conditioner, or a home's electric stove/oven/range. I'd be highly surprised if, of all possible things, this is where they want to cut to lower electricity usage.

giantg2 4y ago
My understanding is that many have supplemental power options, or at least the ability to be hooked up to a mobile one.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  I wouldn't worry about powering the cell tower itself, but more about the backhaul infrastructure that it relies on. In cities it relies on fiber that's often leased from various providers and terminates at datacenters where it shares switching equipment with a lot of other customers of the provider & datacenter, so power can't effectively be segregated. If that datacenter can't be kept powered (and that will require a lot of power), it doesn't matter whether the tower itself remains powered.
gpvos 4y ago
Indeed, not particularly, but they will just lose power together with the buildings around them.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
Load shedding occurs in larger regions of the grid. The utilities don’t have the ability to turn specific sites on and off at random throughout the day.
- Scoundreller 4y ago
  They can with smartmeters
alex_duf 4y ago
I think it's more about the cell towers being cut at the same time as their local area. Where it's easy to anticipate that hospitals/police stations/fire birgades will need a special connection to the grid, it probably was harder 20 years ago to realise the numerous new cell towers also needed to be put on a separate connection. So they'll get cut at the same time as the companies and the houses in the local area.

doix 4y ago

I've been in South Africa for the last month, which has had an energy crisis since around 2007 and somehow they manage to keep mobile networks up during load shedding. There are 2:30 hour (sometimes 4:30 hour) blackouts daily and yet everything seems to keep chugging along. Mobile towers are probably have some of the highest electricity:benefit ratios out there, it would be silly to not prioritize them.

tapland 4y ago
In Sweden we haven’t separated their power supply from anything else, so rolling blackouts will kill them as well. And the blackouts are probably coming sooner than a fix can be in place
- dijit 4y ago
  I actually had a problem with Swedens approach a few years ago. The Swedish power grid is a single grid and the idea is: all eggs in one basket, but pay close attention to the basket. Unfortunately when it comes to datacenter designations, two independent power feeds is required for tier 2 and above. Excluding all datacenters in Sweden. At least some portions of Canada are also excluded because they have rules that say that only hospitals are allowed to have two independent power feeds. So Ubisofts Montreal Datacenter is in the same building as a hospital...
  - gerikson 4y ago
    How does that work in for example the US? The Texas grid is separate from the rest of the continent, no?
    - lostapathy 4y ago
      You can connect to separate energy providers - such that if one provider or their transmission infrastructure goes down, you're still connected to and online with the other provider.
    - zinekeller 4y ago

neonsunset 4y ago

Imagine using easily expendable and non-renewable resources, subjecting the very processes our civilization is sustained by to a great risk of failure while having an almost inexhaustible source of energy that was invented more than 50 years ago. Surely that would be a madness and no reasonable organization would do this, right?

fsh 4y ago
According to IAEA data, there is considerably more minable coal than uranium on earth (by extractible energy). Current nuclear reactors are not scalable to global energy requirements.
- neonsunset 4y ago
- Ruthalas 4y ago
  Is that "more" by mass, or energy content?
  - fsh 4y ago
    Energy content of course. Uranium contains quite some energy, but it is also extremely rare. Without breeders, it would be exhausted in a few years.
dopidopHN 4y ago
Is the inexhaustible uranium in your comment? I’m unclear. Uranium is fine. But it’s totally exhaust-able.

TrackerFF 4y ago

Mobile networks should of course be classified as critical infrastructure, and thus be exempt from any rolling blackouts.

blueflow 4y ago
They already are. The article is just sensationalist. And from all providers, they picked Deutsche Telekom, which is like the provider with the worst reputation in terms of reliability and service. Of course the german internet is in shambles if you ask DTAG... because theirs is.
- Semaphor 4y ago
  > which is like the provider with the worst reputation in terms of reliability and service Every other provider would like a word with you. I don’t even think there’s a good one outside tiny ones.
  - blueflow 4y ago
    Intentional superlative, DTAG is the worst, it doesn't say the others are good. It just says they are less bad.
gpvos 4y ago
Too little time to implement that before the winter. Mobile phones used to be supplemental to the old fixed phone network, which is on separate power.

giantg2 4y ago

My first thought was actually that this was concerning EMP or radiological issues if Putin goes nuclear.

Kye 4y ago
If Europe's power systems are anything like those in the US, Russia hopefully wouldn't risk a cascade failure going all the way to Russia with an EMP.
- gpvos 4y ago
  Europe's are actually a bit more robust, like the article says. But still far from invulnerable.
  - giantg2 4y ago
    I was thinking more about the electronics associate with the towers and handsets.

izacus 4y ago

I strongly strongly doubt that critical emergency call infrastructure will be blacked out before literally anything else. Even when massive ice buildup took down a whole region's power grid in my home EU country, mobile cell towers were the first to be kept up and brought online to allow emergency services and citizens to communicate. This feels like a nothing burger from Reuters (which is publishing some seriously dubious news these days).

Kye 4y ago
The general vibe of quotes from governments/operators in the article is they intend to find ways to keep essential services running in the event outages last longer than a couple of hours.
gpvos 4y ago
Indeed, they will just black out together with everything else. They are generally not on separate distribution circuits. They do have some limited backup power though.
- izacus 4y ago
  The ones I was helping deploy usually had generators as backup because the requirements from the government was that emergency call infrastructure works when power goes out. I can see smaller network operators save money on backups, but major monopolies usually don't have a choice in this manner. So I wonder which regions don't do that?
  - gpvos 4y ago
    As far as I know the Netherlands doesn't. But I don't work in that industry.
  - bismuthcrystal 4y ago
    For how long can these generators run?

sschueller 4y ago

Mobile networks are considered essential. They will be the last thing to be turned off. I would expect trains to stop running first and businesses having their power cut before any cell tower would be affected. I would also like the point out that network operators have mobile cell towers they can deploy and do deploy during large crowd events. These run for hours on diesel. This is sensationalist journalism trying to sell papers. Every paper will be reprinting this in their language as they do for many reuters articles. Irresponsible IMO just like the weekly nuclear holocaust headlines because of that reactor in Ukraine. How about we educate the public instead of printing garbage headlines?

chriscappuccio 4y ago

Lots of people here seem to echo the idea that there is a way to prioritize cellular towers. That's up to whoever runs then. The power goes off for everyone in the area. They need to have enough batteries and generator capacity. Many sites have no generators and battery capacity will vary. Some carriers try to have a week or two of battery capacity but that isn't practical at small sites. When power starts going off, the towers will be prioritized through alternate power sources maintained by the carriers or their contractors.

FollowingTheDao 4y ago

My serious question: Is this a way for the EU nations to quell public uprisings from fuel shortages by limiting network communications while not taking the blame for it?

amalter 4y ago
No. They are talking about limited disruptions to limited areas due to planned load shedding. If your power and phone are out for 4-6 hours - is that going to suppress your ability to protest? I know I'm not supposed to do this, but is this "concern trolling"? I can't see how you could get from A->B unless you're trying to rabble rouse?
- FollowingTheDao 4y ago
  I got from A -> B because https://www.wionews.com/photos/in-pics-protests-across-europe-over-energy-crisis-513394#uk-513390 https://www.wionews.com/photos/in-pics-protests-across-europ... https://carnegieendowment.org/2022/03/31/government-internet-shutdowns-are-changing.-how-should-citizens-and-democracies-respond-pub-86687 https://carnegieendowment.org/2022/03/31/government-internet... It is not a fault, but a virtue to be suspicious of governments during times of protest. Does a 4 hour black out slow down protests? Probably not, but it does not stop countries like India from constantly doing so: https://therecord.media/governments-intentionally-shut-down-internet-182-times-across-34-countries-in-2021-report/ https://therecord.media/governments-intentionally-shut-down-... Planting narratives in the media is not an unusual agency tactic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_influence_on_public_opinion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_influence_on_public_opinio...

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

I see a lot of confusion in the comments about why cell towers would be impacted. Load shedding in the grid occurs across regions of the grid. The power companies don’t choose which specific sites to cut off. If cellular infrastructure is in part of the grid that gets disconnected, it will go down too (after exhausting its backup supply). The top priority for keeping power on goes to grid segments with life-sustaining equipment. If you live within a grid segment that also powers a hospital you will likely not be subject to load shedding.

alibert 4y ago
Indeed, a large part of cell towers are hosted on the rooftop of residential buildings and mostly connected to the same electrical network. In France, most homes have a smartmeter (called "Linky") and these could be used to have very precise load shedding (they communicate with PLC) but I believe this feature is not available or developed (yet?).
myself248 4y ago
The critical detail is that the batteries are configured for standby service, not cycling service, which means that they don't recharge quickly when power comes back on. They're set to a float voltage which maximizes battery service life (years), at the expense of cycle time (hours). The first time power cuts, you might have 8-10 hours to run on battery. But if it comes back on and then goes off again just a few hours later, the batteries might've only recovered 3 hours of charge. Increasing the recharge rate wouldn't be technically complicated (just adjust the rectifier output), but it would have a logistical cost: These rectifiers aren't designed to be fiddled with so it would take a bit of skill, and someone with that skill would have to visit every site. Worse, by boosting the rectifier voltage, the batteries would then fail faster, as commensurate with cycling rather than standby service. A site that normally gets 10 years on its battery plant might need new batteries every 3 years, for instance. That's a bad deal. (And no, the rectifiers simply are not set up to do multi-stage charging. That would add a bunch of coordination and complexity that's just not needed in standby service where they can output a simple float voltage and be done with it. Changing that would be a forklift upgrade, replacing the simple rectifiers with complex chargers.) It's reasonable that new sites may be installed with lithium batteries someday instead of lead-acid, and that may already be occurring in some places, and that would solve the problem quite simply because lithium just has such higher charge acceptance rates. You can float-charge a lithium and still use it in cycling service because it absorbs charge much more readily even on float. Lead-acids charge incredibly slowly on float, which is fine in a standby application, but it might be the Achilles' heel here.

rad_gruchalski 4y ago

I live at a Germany/Belgium border, and have no mobile service sometimes for days. So yeah, whatever…

londons_explore 4y ago

This won't happen - instead big users will be told to shut down completely.

scifibestfi 4y ago

This will be amazing advertising for Starlink.

mrtksn 4y ago
You should check out how much power the Starlink base station requires. It's one of its main issues.
- scifibestfi 4y ago
  You just need a phone and network that uses it. https://www.t-mobile.com/news/un-carrier/t-mobile-takes-coverage-above-and-beyond-with-spacex https://www.t-mobile.com/news/un-carrier/t-mobile-takes-cove...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - james_pm 4y ago
    And a few years until it actually exists. "starting with a beta in select areas by the end of next year after SpaceX’s planned satellite launches". On Elon time, that's 2025 and perhaps never.

scifibestfi 4y ago

"Russia's decision to halt gas supplies via Europe's key supply route in the wake of the Ukraine conflict has increased the chances of power shortages." Europe's decision, Germany especially, to be reliant on Russia for energy when they could have not shut down nuclear plants and built more.

j-pb 4y ago
- stingraycharles 4y ago
  Not trying to argue with you, just trying to understand as someone from a neighboring country — could you elaborate a bit more about what happened with the Conservative Party undermining the green energy effort? And how close would Germany realistically have been to being completely self-sufficient by now if that didn’t happen?
  - throw827474737 4y ago
    Blocking wind power and grid efforts everywhere, stopping planned storage efforts, man we even shut down pump storages etc over the last decades that would be so necessary to have any chance to support and realize base load with renewables. Right now we are shedding cheap bio gas and wind power production again (and that given we build up much too little as we could have) while the power stock exchanges have fun gambling. On top this constant nuclear narrative, which is not even much significant for current power production, this is all beyond any funny. Google translate those for few alternstive povs: https://www.klimareporter.de/strom/deutschland-fackelt-gas-ab https://www.klimareporter.de/strom/deutschland-fackelt-gas-a... https://www.makawind.de/index.php?show=news https://www.makawind.de/index.php?show=news https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_Pumpspeicherkraftwerken#Aufgegebene_Projekte https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_Pumpspeicherkraftw...
    - chess_buster 4y ago
      Oh yeah, I forgot. All of that, too. And this is the look of the politician in question https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/35/Peter_Altmaier_Portrait.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/35/Peter_Al...

ajross 4y ago

This headline is awful. There's nothing specific to "mobile networks" in this news at all. They're saying that there's a potential energy crisis and that it might impact phones. ...which is also just plain ridiculous! Phone service is a critical piece of infrastructure and in almost all markets subject to special treatment and provided with redundant power mechanisms. Lots of things may break this winter. Phones won't be one of them.

Aloha 4y ago

I'm a former field engineer for a US Cellular carrier. I don't understand how a two hour outage is a panic event, both Cellular CO's and Cell Sites should have at least 3-4 hours of holdover time. Thats just the standard of design. Like, what happens if I storm blows thru, knocks down the infrastructure, if you have heat related infrastructure failures, or some other just normal failure - power outages happen, for those sites in the states where long power outages are common they'll have a permanent generator on site.

myself248 4y ago
Same here and likewise baffled. TFA says: > Europe has nearly half a million telecom towers and most of them have battery backups that last around 30 minutes to run the mobile antennas. Which seems bonkers to me. Perhaps they deploy incredibly small batteries because they're engineered for a different outage profile than the US? Or perhaps the reporter is quoting something inappropriately -- traditional large sites with many hours, and many new small sites with no backup at all, might well average out to 30 minutes. I think there's real work to be done on improving bring-up time when power returns, though. I worked on the EVDO rollout and rebooting a site after work would take 20-30 minutes because it's something that's only expected to happen once in a blue moon. I believe if they relaxed GPS timing tolerances a bit and optimized a few other things, this could be shortened to 5-ish minutes without a whole lot of work.
- Aloha 4y ago
  The Samsung gear I worked on would take about 10 min to come back up, give or take. I know because I dropped a handful of sites when I did power testing - visual inspection was not always enough to verify if the power was wired correctly. Most of them came back up in 10 min.. well, except once there was one site that didn't come back because the Microwave didn't like the power hit, lol - that required another tower crew to revisit and hang a new RRU. I just can't imagine power design is that different, I'm used to these cabinets even in urban areas having 4 strings of batteries in them, are they only building sites with a single string in europe?
- 9dev 4y ago

antonymy 4y ago

So it's not turning off mobile networks in particular, it's just a general power shortage, a consequence of which might be some cell service being interrupted. They made it sound like they were going to shut off mobile networks specifically to save power, which doesn't make sense for a couple of reasons. Starting to feel like Reuters isn't worth my time anymore. Too many clickbaity titles like this lately.

toyg 4y ago
I was reading the other day that they've made dramatic cuts in most of their local offices, and their material is now largely produced in a central hub in a low-cost Eastern European country. It shows.
- throwie_wayward 4y ago
  they're running a business, after all.

pier25 4y ago

In Mexico power cuts are so frequent that most (probably all) cell towers have batteries that last for an hour or two. It's rare that power cuts last so long, usually it's like 10-15 mins, but I've experienced 3-4 hours cuts a couple of times over the years. When I lived in Cancún these were more frequent though, because AC consuming so much power during summer.

masswerk 4y ago

Seeing `&` on a page like Reuters is quite a throwback to the 1990s. There's actually something soothing about the imperfect exposing the "stroke" of the underlying media. :-)

torcete 4y ago

USA is using and destroying Europe in its proxy war against Russia.

vkou 4y ago
It's a little bit more complicated than that, much of Eastern Europe is also happy to both make and hop into that bed.
_-david-_ 4y ago
Maybe Europe should take responsibility for reckless energy policies over multiple decades?

zanethomas 4y ago

Easily predictable, and predicted, unintended consequence.

DoingIsLearning 4y ago

Vodafone Portugal suffered an extremely successful cyber attack in February 2022, taking down: - 4G - 5G - Fixed voice - Digital TV - SMS - voice It took _several_ days to bring everything back online. [0] No Ransomware requests issued, most likely a state actor. Many people speculate the attack was a training ground for Russian cyberwarfare. I find this a much more likely failure mode for communications (including emergency services) than network operators not managing uptime because of blackouts. [0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/02/vodafone-portugal-struggles-to-restore-service-following-cyberattack/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/02/vodaf...

TacticalCoder 4y ago

I can understand why that'd happen. Where I live, in France atm, there's one cell tower around. And when it's down, it's down. I know because in June there have been one hour of electrical blackout about once a week and, well, our smartphones weren't working anymore. I don't even bother with an UPS or a 4G router for my network: when there's no electricity, nothing is working anymore anyway. Stuff that keeps working for a few hours: the Kindle, tablet and local files on the laptops. So there's that.

Scoundreller 4y ago
Your station météo should be good for a few months until the batteries go out, so at least there’s that.

voidr 4y ago

This is extremely irresponsible, how are you supposed to make a call if you have an emergency? People are going to die. The EU needs to recognise the situation: this is not working, 15% of Ukraine is now part of Russia despite all the NATO help. Meanwhile the US is laughing as the dollar is rising above everything and the media is un-ironically saying that it could have been the US who blew up the pipelines in the Baltic Sea.