Reacción a "Why telecommunications were so vulnerable during the blackout"

When there is a blackout, telecommunications infrastructures start to fail because, for communication to take place, the entire signal path from source to destination has to be operational. For example, to send or receive a WhatsApp, your terminal has to work, but also all the nodes of the telecommunications infrastructure up to the WhatsApp server, both yours and that of the other user. Your mobile phone may be working, even connected to a mobile phone base station that is operational thanks to backup batteries that last for a few hours. But that's not enough, because the signal doesn't just have to reach that mobile phone base station, it has to go through the telecommunications infrastructure, through many router nodes, intermediate equipment to certain servers, and the path to the recipient also has to be operational.

Therefore, when there is a blackout, even if there is electricity in my neighbourhood, if there is no electricity in other neighbourhoods where this information has to circulate, the communication cannot be established.

Most often in these cases, there are parts of the telecommunications infrastructure that are operational, either because they have battery backup or because the power has not gone out in those parts, and others that are not. On the one hand, when there is an emergency situation, traffic usually increases because everyone wants to communicate. And, apart from that increase in traffic, all network paths are not open, only some of them are partially operational and congestion occurs.

The mobile phone network provides partial service for a while thanks to backup batteries, but gradually these batteries run out until eventually we have no service at all if the blackout lasts for a long time. An alternative could be a fleet of low-orbit satellites similar to Starlink's, but with a European scope so as not to be dependent on geostrategic, geopolitical issues, on interests outside Europe. In this sense, the IRIS² network of low-orbit satellites is being created. As these satellites do not depend on terrestrial electricity supply, but have solar panels, a blackout such as the one we have experienced would not affect this fleet and would provide an alternative communications structure that would not have the capacity of a normal communications system with many users, but could be sufficient for certain critical services or for communications with lower bandwidth.