Europe braces for mobile network blackouts

&quot;Russia&#x27;s decision to halt gas supplies via Europe&#x27;s key supply route in the wake of the Ukraine conflict has increased the chances of power shortages.&quot;<p>Europe&#x27;s decision, Germany especially, to be reliant on Russia for energy when they could have not shut down nuclear plants and built more.

I&#x27;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.<p>Mobile towers are probably have some of the highest electricity:benefit ratios out there, it would be silly to not prioritize them.

A typical cell tower uses 4kW to 5kW, sometimes less (at least in the states). That&#x27;s reasonably close to a standard home&#x27;s central air conditioner, or a home&#x27;s electric stove&#x2F;oven&#x2F;range.<p>I&#x27;d be highly surprised if, of all possible things, <i>this</i> is where they want to cut to lower electricity usage.

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).<p>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.

So it&#x27;s not turning off mobile networks in particular, it&#x27;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&#x27;t make sense for a couple of reasons.<p>Starting to feel like Reuters isn&#x27;t worth my time anymore. Too many clickbaity titles like this lately.

I strongly strongly doubt that critical emergency call infrastructure will be blacked out before literally anything else.<p>Even when massive ice buildup took down a whole region&#x27;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.<p>This feels like a nothing burger from Reuters (which is publishing some seriously dubious news these days).

I&#x27;m a former field engineer for a US Cellular carrier.<p>I don&#x27;t understand how a two hour outage is a panic event, both Cellular CO&#x27;s and Cell Sites should have at least 3-4 hours of holdover time. Thats just the standard of design.<p>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&#x27;ll have a permanent generator on site.

In Mexico power cuts are so frequent that most (probably all) cell towers have batteries that last for an hour or two.<p>It&#x27;s rare that power cuts last so long, usually it&#x27;s like 10-15 mins, but I&#x27;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.

Vodafone Portugal suffered an extremely successful cyber attack in February 2022, taking down:<p>- 4G<p>- 5G<p>- Fixed voice<p>- Digital TV<p>- SMS<p>- voice<p>It took _several_ days to bring everything back online. [0]<p>No Ransomware requests issued, most likely a state actor.<p>Many people speculate the attack was a training ground for Russian cyberwarfare.<p>I find this a much more likely failure mode for communications (including emergency services) than network operators not managing uptime because of blackouts.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;information-technology&#x2F;2022&#x2F;02&#x2F;vodafone-portugal-struggles-to-restore-service-following-cyberattack&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;information-technology&#x2F;2022&#x2F;02&#x2F;vodaf...</a>

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

Lots of people here seem to echo the idea that there is a way to prioritize cellular towers. That&#x27;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&#x27;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.

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

I can understand why that&#x27;d happen. Where I live, in France atm, there&#x27;s <i>one</i> cell tower around. And when it&#x27;s down, it&#x27;s down. I know because in June there have been one hour of electrical blackout about once a week and, well, our smartphones weren&#x27;t working anymore. I don&#x27;t even bother with an UPS or a 4G router for my network: when there&#x27;s no electricity, nothing is working anymore anyway.<p>Stuff that keeps working for a few hours: the Kindle, tablet and local files on the laptops. So there&#x27;s that.

Seeing `&amp;amp;` on a page like Reuters is quite a throwback to the 1990s. There&#x27;s actually something soothing about the imperfect exposing the &quot;stroke&quot; of the underlying media. :-)

This headline is awful. There&#x27;s nothing specific to &quot;mobile networks&quot; in this news at all. They&#x27;re saying that there&#x27;s a potential energy crisis and that it might impact phones.<p>...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.<p>Lots of things may break this winter. Phones won&#x27;t be one of them.

This is extremely irresponsible, how are you supposed to make a call if you have an emergency? People are going to die.<p>The EU needs to recognise the situation: this is not working, 15% of Ukraine is now part of Russia despite all the NATO help.<p>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.

I live at a Germany&#x2F;Belgium border, and have no mobile service sometimes for days. So yeah, whatever…

This won&#x27;t happen - instead big users will be told to shut down completely.

This will be amazing advertising for Starlink.

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.<p>Surely that would be a madness and no reasonable organization would do this, right?

Easily predictable, and predicted, unintended consequence.

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.<p>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.<p>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?

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?

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

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