Phone services disrupted across B.C., but emergency calls still working (opens in new tab)

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.

> I find it interesting that all our major _competing_ cell phone providers

Bell and Telus got together to build their networks when they upgraded to 3G. Bell runs the towers in the east, and Telus in the west. (And they got Huawei to do it for them...)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/bell-teams-up-wit...

The CEOs of these competitors literally called each other up and had a friendly about how to save themselves a few billion while eliminating the risk of any price war between eachother.

They’re literally the same network appearing as 1.

So while you have the big3 « providers » and a bazillion of their sub-brands, there’s only 2 « national » networks.

And then Rogers leases some network space from Bell/Telus as the Rogers-Ext network for some rural areas, meaning everyone is using the same gear on the same tower.

One interesting thing is that North Bend is alongside a highway/railway/river. Even if there were multiple independent cables running alongside the river, I suppose a large landslide could knock them all out. There are railway tracks on both sides of the river though, and phone lines were often run alongside railway tracks (or roads), so even though it's one valley, two fiber paths should be possible.

Ideally you'd ensure geographically diverse routes for internet fiber, but I don't know how easy that is for legacy telephony networks.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/North+Bend,+BC,+Canada/@49...

Based on an area information lookup, the line likely belongs to Shaw https://www.ic.gc.ca/app/sitt/bbmap/hm.html?lang=eng

> North Bend BC

OT, but I was curious and looked it up, and there are three North Bends in the Pacific Northwest (OR, WA, and BC). What a coincidence!

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.

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.

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...

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”.