
Phone services disrupted across B.C., but emergency calls still working - bitminer
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/cell-services-down-1.5449130
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sbarre
I find it interesting that all our major _competing_ cell phone providers were
equally affected in a pretty material way by this.

The claim (by Bell) is that a "third-party fibre line" way up in North Bend BC
was the root cause of this problem..

I know providers all stick their own gear on the same towers, but I guess I
didn't realize how common it was for the top-level providers (i.e. the ILECs)
to lease cables (as opposed to running their own). I always assumed this was
just the resellers (CLECs) who did it..

I wonder if that cable is fully third-party owned, or belongs to TELUS (the
quad-play provider for western Canada) and Bell/Rogers lease capacity from
them for their wireless services.

~~~
JTon
Longhaul cable infrastructure is expensive. Especially in Canada where
business cases are crippled by thousands of km of emptiness (no opportunity to
recover investments). Providers often swap lines through IRU agreements to
reduce capital intensity. I've heard but can't confirm the infrastructure in
question was laid down by CP and CN rail back in the 90s. I don't know the
ownership structure. But I know the railways are still involved in the
maintenance.

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Scoundreller
You’re on the right track: Was called CNCP telecommunications:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNCP_Telecommunications](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNCP_Telecommunications)

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jandrese
If anybody else is having issues loading the article it says a landslide
damaged a fiber backbone.

I guess emergency services must have a backup system or maybe there is a low
bandwidth secondary that can't handle regular call volume and prioritizes
emergency numbers.

~~~
OrangeMango
I worked on wireless infrastructure software about 20 years ago - some of the
stuff that counted as 3G.

The phone does not "dial" the emergency phone number. It tells the tower that
it needs to initiate an emergency call. At that point, the infrastructure
bypasses all authentication/authorization/billing checks and connects to what
the infrastructure knows as the local emergency service. It's a standard voice
connection, made over the same channels as a normal call, with one exception:
if there is no available channel, it drops a normal call to make room.

In this case, some of the potential situations could be occurring: 1) There is
still backbone (backhaul) availability, but perhaps the connection to the
subscriber database has been severed. No normal calls can be authenticated,
but emergency calls don't get authenticated and are thus not impacted. 2)
Everything is working normally but at drastically reduced capacity. With the
normal load of emergency calls, there is simply not enough capacity for normal
calls. If this is the case, it is possible that not all emergency calls are
being completed - the emergency operations center would not have the ability
to know if this was the case.

~~~
jvm_
So, if I go to California with my NY cell phone and dial 911... I get the
emergency services of the tower I connected to? Was always curious who I'd get
when I'm not near home.

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RL_Quine
Yes. You can always make an emergency call, without service from your actual
provided, and without a SIM card.

~~~
jvm_
But who answers? California 911 - because that's where I'm physically located.
or NY 911 because that's where my phone is from?

~~~
Keverw
Based on your location, but I know that there's stories about location not
being accurate, remember seeing a report that some Pizza app and ride sharing
apps can be more accurate. Someone told me on their cell phone 911 went to
state's highway patrol instead of the city police, not sure if true or not
since haven't had to dial 911 from a cell phone.

However if you have VOIP, not all VOIP providers support 911 but the ones that
do want you to set a 911 address on your account itself, phone number or for a
specific Analog telephone adapter - ATA Device from my understanding. I know
our cable company provides phone service and the old modem had a sticker
warning about VOIP and E911, not sure if the new one does or not since haven't
looked at it too much.

~~~
kempbellt
Just guessing based on how the technology works, but I would presume that when
you initiate an emergency call via a cell phone call, the best location
indicator that emergency services receive is "somewhere near tower X", since
you are just making a voice call.

Apps running on the phone have access to your phone's GPS and can get more
precise location data, if you have allowed it. Using an emergency app
(Active911, Smart911, etc) will provide more specific location data to
emergency services, but these are applications that rely on data and GPS to be
working and may not work in as many situations as a simple 911 call.

As far as _who_ receives the call, I imagine it is just based on who the tower
is preconfigured to forward the call to. If the tower you are connected to is
close to a highway, you'll probably get highway patrol. If you're in town,
you'll probably get local police.

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elchief
I'm working from home today because my work's primary and secondary lines to
our data centre are down. We have a tertiary but it's slow. So they didn't
want ppl coming in to the office and using all the bandwidth

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gpvos
Good that emergency calls still work. In the Netherlands we had a handful of
service interruptions (for some regions/providers) in the last few years, and
the emergency numbers went down as well. If I remember correctly, the problems
were mostly caused by software.

~~~
moftz
It depends on the infrastructure but sometimes emergency calls are routed
differently, sometimes over completely different systems. There's a system in
the US called GETS that allows federal, state, and local government agencies
to make high priority calls over normal commercial phone systems and will also
make use of government only phone lines, whatever will make the connection.
The agency gets a special code and a certain phone number they dial first
(just like using one of those old long distance cards). There is dedicated
bandwidth just for these kinds of phone calls so even if all the lines are
full, there is a guaranteed 90% call completion rate if the call volume is 8
times higher than normal.

There's a wireless version of this too although it doesn't quite work the same
so I'm not sure how effective it really is.

~~~
gpvos
The Netherlands has a network for the emergency services that is entirely
separated from the normal phone network ("Noodnet"). It has a limited service
and bandwidth and normally has no interconnection with the normal phone
network (so is not intended or usable for emergency calls from the public),
but is designed to be very resilient. I don't think it is used when the normal
phone network is still functioning. I have no idea how they test it; it must
all be rather expensive.

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malandrew
We experienced this in Central Washington this weekend as well (around
Leavenworth and Steven's Pass). Cell service went out late Saturday night and
only recovered Sunday afternoon.

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blondie9x
It looks like this is related to another extreme weather event. An epic
rainstorm. [https://www.straight.com/tech/1354721/rogers-and-bell-
cellph...](https://www.straight.com/tech/1354721/rogers-and-bell-cellphone-
service-down-across-much-british-columbia-wake-rainstorm) climate change is
making rain storms more powerful and intense.

~~~
noizejoy
I’m assuming that the link in parent post is in error and was intended to be
this one[0], which specifically mentions the connection between climate change
and the extraordinarily high amounts of rain having fallen in the area around
the time of the outage:

[0] [https://www.straight.com/life/1354586/pineapple-express-
brin...](https://www.straight.com/life/1354586/pineapple-express-brings-
stunning-amounts-rain-south-coast-british-columbia)

p.s. I’ve always liked that these winter rain storms coming into BC, Canada
from the general direction of Hawaii are colloquially called “Pineapple
Express”.

