Order of fallback systems, should the internet go down? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: eti
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 29, 2021, 04:45:25 am
content: I’ve often thought about this - which systems would be the mainstay - the robust stalwart, if the entire internet and VoIP went down.My reasoning brings me to system fallbacks in this order:#1 Entire internet goes down.#2 Entire POTS & GSM/cellular nets go down.#3 Ham radio cannot “go down” truly, as it’s a reflected, point to point system (afaik) using transmission and ionospheric reflection/skips to propagate the signals.What thoughts have you on this - is Ham the most robust? It seems to be.Thanks.

author: Nusa
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 29, 2021, 05:27:32 am
content: Sat phones, or were they included in phone failures?AM/FM radio, still a thing almost everyplace.First responder and commercial radio networks.Over the air TV, where it still exists.Newspapers, where they still exist.Your current ability to instantly interact with the larger world audience isn't actually that important on the survival scale. You can make friends with and talk with your neighbors like 50 years ago if you crave human interaction.

author: eti
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 29, 2021, 05:40:05 am
content: Quote from: Nusa on October 29, 2021, 05:27:32 amI suppose satellite phones are networked, aren’t they? If so, I’d exclude them too.Yeah you’re right - all this instant messaging hogwash is just because a lot of people are impatient and think they’re missing something 😂 and yes, I live in a small village and that’s exactly what we do.

author: Nusa
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 29, 2021, 08:15:52 am
content: While the internet is a large collection of connected networks, that doesn't mean that all networks are part of the internet. Or even if they are, that local operation would automatically fail when global operation does.

author: Ed.Kloonk
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 29, 2021, 08:32:31 am
content: The internet will never totally 'go down'.I think the question you should be asking is: What services can I expect to access after the dung hits the proverbial?

author: eti
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 29, 2021, 08:41:48 am
content: Quote from: Ed.Kloonk on October 29, 2021, 08:32:31 amI’m not sure anyone is truly able to guarantee that. Just because it hasn’t to date, that’s not to say it cannot. Networking is incredibly complex, whereas radio is incredibly simple and doesn’t require a bazillion TCP/IP layers, routers, switches et cetera - radio needs none of that nonsense, natural physics is inherently elegant in this respect.

author: Ed.Kloonk
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 29, 2021, 08:46:45 am
content: Quote from: eti on October 29, 2021, 08:41:48 amI'm just not sure during a zombie apocalypse just how many hams will be on and prepared to give away their location (transmission via triangulation of food statsh)

author: eti
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 29, 2021, 08:49:24 am
content: Quote from: Ed.Kloonk on October 29, 2021, 08:46:45 am.I don’t think we need to resort to swinging to the extremes of fantasy and sci-fi nonsense and associated exaggeration to show that the internet couldn’t collapse.Software, being a human construct, is riddled with errors. All it takes is one person or group to find an aspect of flawed design that is present but no one found UNTIL they did, and it’s game over. The internet as a whole is amazing, but let’s not assume human failings don’t exist and attempt to portray that the man made can’t be man broken.Improbable != impossibleAnyway, I’m asking about the most robust comms system in any event, which is not a exclusive to the net melting down, it was just an example that we can relate to.

author: Ed.Kloonk
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 29, 2021, 09:00:16 am
content: During the bushfires here and also demonstrated in the states on a few occasions, the cellular network was closed off to just a certain few handsets owned by those combatting the local problem. By the authorities.It's not sci-fi and it wont be a Russian bad actor. But I take your point I was being facetious.

author: eti
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 29, 2021, 09:16:27 am
content: Quote from: Ed.Kloonk on October 29, 2021, 09:00:16 amThat’s the failure of text media - tone doesn’t convey well (or at all). He he. No worries 😌

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 29, 2021, 10:57:25 am
content: The internet can't just cease to exist in the blink of an eye.The whole thing called 'the internet' is not one singular thing. Its all a collection of telecommunication companies and institutions maintaining there own network that also connects to the network owned by others around them. All of them using routing algorithms to get the traffic trough on the optimal route. When a network link goes down the traffic is rerouted trough the next best route.These networks that combine together to form the internet use a wide range of networking equipment manufactured by companies around the world, so even if a deadly exploit is found it would not take down all of the networks, only some of them. The worst case is that so many links go down that these networks get cut off from each other. This can easily happen to small countries that might only have one or two links connecting it to the rest of the world. Yet even in that case the network can still talk inside itself. Any website hosted within that country would stay up, as the route to that IP is still available and the DNS server to locate the address is hosted by the local ISP (holding a cache of the global DNS records)The internet is constantly failing on a daily basis. From big mistakes like Facebook crashing there entire network by mistake, or small one from a contractor drilling trough a fiber cable in a wall, causing a few thousand IPs in some company building to be cut off, to medium ones of someone ripping a ISPs fiber line with en excavator. Sometimes a backup kicks in and nobody even notices, sometimes it results in a bunch of unhappy computer users for a few hours.Cell networks and POTS lines are mostly just another network connected into the same internet infrastructure.If the global situation gets so bad that all international internet links go down, then you will likely also have issues with access to mains power and running water. At that point the knowledge of how to use a radio is going to be less important than a lot of other survival skills. This could very well happen at some point, but i hope it won't be in my lifetime.

author: NiHaoMike
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 29, 2021, 01:03:38 pm
content: I would expect satellite to be the most resilient to pretty much all natural disasters except solar storms.Haven't watched it yet but this should be a good explanation of how amateur radio operators prepare to operate during emergencies.

author: station240
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: November 01, 2021, 03:35:52 am
content: Quote from: eti on October 29, 2021, 04:45:25 amIt's more likely #2 would fail first.There is an official US government document somewhere that states that if the current POTS/Cell/Cable networks were to totally fail, not to attempt to repair them.That is the existing equipment has enough obsolete junk as to not be worth rebuilding, that building a new network would make more sense.Rather dated, as predates things like the FiOS rollout, but I do agree with that concept.Anyway the internet has so much inbuilt redundancy, both in who owns/runs what, and redundant paths/equipment, it would take an act of god to kill it totally.

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 01, 2021, 05:35:12 pm
content: Quote from: eti on October 29, 2021, 08:41:48 amThe internet isliterallythe outcome of Cold War research into a network that could survive nuclear war. So while it’s true that (simple) radio is very resilient, so is the internet. What makes the internet resilient is that it is distributed. There’s no one control center. There’s no one managing entity. You could lop the internet in half, and each half would continue to be an internet, kinda like a tapeworm.The technical definition is that the internet is anetwork of networks. Each one is fundamentally self-contained except for its “connector” to other networks.I’d say that if there is a weak point in the modern internet, it’s DNS, because if DNS fails, you can’t find the servers you need, even if they’re still up and running. (This is exactly how Facebook self-immolated recently: it accidentally took down its own DNS, leaving them unable to reach their DNS servers to fix them, because they were themselves only accessible using DNS!So they had to physically go to the data centers and fix it right on the machines, which (rightfully) requires getting through many layers of physical security.)Remember also that what people think the internet is varies wildly: end users think it’s the web. But the web is just one service running on the internet. There are dozens of (often silently) user-facing services, and then a bunch of under-the-hood ones only system administrators ever deal with, and then some even deeper under-the-hood services only certain caliber of network admins ever interact with.In the end, shutting down the internet would be like saying “shutting down all land travel”. Yes, you could take out major highways. And yes, you could bomb a particular area to kingdom come, not even so much as leaving an existing foot path. But you’d never be able to knock out all land travel, because people can walk across fields. The internet is much the same.

author: madires
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 01, 2021, 06:14:16 pm
content: Quote from: eti on October 29, 2021, 04:45:25 amThose usually share the same fiber infrastructure. So all will fail when the underlying optical transport fails. Local POTS might survive for some time if your exchange office isn't "upgraded" to VoIP yet. If you're concerned about that you can get a ham radio license or an inexpensive CB radio. But I don't worry about a major telecommunication outage, because it would also come with a power outage which is more troublesome.

author: PlainName
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 01, 2021, 07:10:22 pm
content: QuoteI think differently. With travel you are dependant on yourself. Without major roads you can generally get around, albeit sometimes quite slowly and carefully. You don't even need any road at all to do that. With the internet you are completely dependant on your uplink. Without your ISP you're talking to no-one, and without their provider (because they are likely to be resellers) they won't be able to pass anything on even if you sent them a carrier pigeon.Also don't forget that some countries are easily able to cut off the internet on a whim. And recent accidental routing issues have taken parts offline.The much vaunted resilience and redundancy only applies if you actually have alternative routes to switch to. The backbone does but the vast proportion of internet users don't. Some parts of the internet will keep up, and those attached to those parts will be able to connect to each other, but the likes of you and me won't be in those parts.

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 02, 2021, 07:06:31 am
content: Quote from: tooki on November 01, 2021, 05:35:12 pmDNS is also distributed, if nothing else in order to be fast and handle the traffic.There are lots of DNS servers around, each ISP typically hosts its own set of DNS servers for there own network. These servers exchange the "DNS address book" with each other so that they can learn about new domains while holding the entire thing to serve to its users quickly. Some of the more professional routers also hold a DNS cache locally to improve the speed of DNS lookups (Tho they usually just hold the most recently looked up sites, not the whole thing). So typically you will at least have the ISPs DNS servers to go from. If those go down then your ISP is probably down too anyway. The tough thing is that once you loose DNS you can have difficulty finding another working one because you can't even get to google to search for it. So unless you have one memorized you would have to randomly portscan internet IPs until you find something that looks like DNS (Most users will not know how to do this)That being said most people already have 2 redundant roads into the internet, the copper/fiber to there house and the cellular network. The later can also be expanded easily by getting data only SIM cards for the various networks in your area.Keeping the local ISPs up is quite important for the economy, so they will try pretty hard to keep them going for as long as possible when shit hits the fan. But as i said before i hope i will never see it happen because this amount of shit hitting the fan would also cause me much worse things than not being able to google stuff.

author: Nusa
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 02, 2021, 07:15:14 am
content: There's quite a few DNS's one could use aside from your ISP, but the ones I don't have to look up are easy to remember:8.8.8.8 Google9.9.9.9 Quad91.1.1.1 Cloudflare

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 02, 2021, 07:42:47 am
content: Quote from: Nusa on November 02, 2021, 07:15:14 amYep i use those too. with the ISPs as a fallback. If i have DNS issues i typically use the google one to test it.But most people don't, so for them when there default DNS goes down they are effectively without internet. Keep in mind that most people need to be guided trough how to reboot a modem.

author: mfro
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: November 02, 2021, 08:12:31 am
content: Quote from: Nusa on October 29, 2021, 08:15:52 amFor commercial users, it's actually that Internet isn't the most reliable/safe option. There's indeed a large network world existent independently (and to the most part physically separate) from the public Internet.MPLS providers, e.g., guarantee (at a price) much better availability than any Internet provider.

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 02, 2021, 11:02:00 am
content: Quote from: dunkemhigh on November 01, 2021, 07:10:22 pmThat’s literally the point: parts of the internet can go down, but not the whole thing. The discussion wasn’t about the reliability of one user’s internet connection, but about the resilience of the internet as a whole.

author: PlainName
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 02, 2021, 12:38:10 pm
content: I seem not to have explained very well. If your ISP goes down then you, a single user, will surely be cut off but the point was that many many single users would be the same. If the ISP's suppliers goes down you can easily have half a country offline, so the question is: at what kind of numbers do we consider things to be broken?As I noted, the backbone may well continue, but if you're not connected to it then it's irrelevant. If, for instance, all of Russia is offline, isn't the internet broken for them? How many such problem are needed before the internet is deemed to be down? Does having a working backbone with no actual user nodes connected count?

author: madires
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 02, 2021, 12:47:37 pm
content: Quote from: mfro on November 02, 2021, 08:12:31 amToday most providers run MPLS in their networks anyway. It doesn't matter if you have an MPLS based layer 3 VPN or internet access/transit, they all run over the same infrastructure. Running different networks for different services is simply too expensive. That's also the reason why telcos migrate their telephone service to IP. One network for all services.

author: G7PSK
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 02, 2021, 02:21:55 pm
content: Supposing there was a massive EMP then a week later another EMP, what would survive The mains power goes down on the first one then the back up system goes down, where are we then. No power no internet and most likely no radios as well.

author: madires
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 02, 2021, 02:36:25 pm
content: A few days ago we had an X1 class solar flare. Luckily nothing bad happened.