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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. Taki
by jeroenhd 1y ago
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.
- dylan604 1y agoAnd 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
- toast0 1y agoDepends 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.
- ryao 1y agoYou 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.