GC Report: "The Vulneramility of Mobile Telecommunications to Natural Hazards"

[vabiro]

GC Report: "The Vulneramility of Mobile Telecommunications to Natural Hazards"

Hi,

Published by the Office of Critical Infrastructure Protection and Emergency Preparedness.

This report looks as though it has been around for a while (dated March 2001), but makes for an interesting read.

http://dsp-psd.pwgsc.gc.ca/collection_2008/ps-sp/D82-82-2003E.pdf

Sorry if it has been posted before, but I hadn't seen it and I'm sure there are a few others that may not have seen it.

Cheers
Victor

 

[mobile1]

Thanks for the link . I read this report before but never thought to post it here . I am from Saskatchewan and looked only at that part of the report and found that all cell phones CDMA/AMPS and FleetNet800 radios province wide are controled from one location in Saskatoon. Then I found another report that asked the Minister in charge of SaskTel about this and he said that it was true. You then have to ask yourself why would they do this ? This was done so that the SPOOKS can listen in on all the cellphone/radio calls in the province!

 

[vabiro]

Thanks for the link . I read this report before but never thought to post it here . I am from Saskatchewan and looked only at that part of the report and found that all cell phones CDMA/AMPS and FleetNet800 radios province wide are controled from one location in Saskatoon. Then I found another report that asked the Minister in charge of SaskTel about this and he said that it was true. You then have to ask yourself why would they do this ? This was done so that the SPOOKS can listen in on all the cellphone/radio calls in the province!

I wouldn't read too much into their motivations for the practice of having minimal switches. The reason is much more mundane.

Most carriers (I have worked for 3) minimise the number of switches for technical and economical reasons. They are crazy expensive, and complex to integrate. For example, a switch must be able to monitor the location of all mobile devices on the network so that the call can be routed, and then handed off. Then they must manage that information for billing etc.. Handoff between switches can be complex.

The switches are actually a combination of hardware and software, and are licensed in a similare way. The hardware is licensed/sold based on the number of interfaces for cell sites, and the SW is licensed based on the number of ESN or IMSIs are loaded on the switch. So improving the utilisation of each switch minimises the likelihood of under-utilised capacity. It's all about developing economies of scale.

CALEA (AKA Lawful Intercept, or bugging) is actually pretty easy to acomplish with any PBX or Mobile Switching Centre (MSC), so adding switches would be a trivial obstacle to invading your privacy

Cheers
Victor

 

[mobile1]

In the second report that I found the Minister for Sask-tel admitted that all calls were monitored for quality.

 

[vabiro]

In the second report that I found the Minister for Sask-tel admitted that all calls were monitored for quality.

Monitoring by carriers is normal procedeure when diagnosing networks. For example if a technician were to be receiving complaints about the phone calls being distorted, or "echoy" they might listen into a call to try and determine what the symptom the customer was complaining about.

This is a pretty basic troubleshooting technique when the network isn't reporting any problem. The key thing is that the call is "monitored for quality" not content. The processes for CALEA interception is different from what would be used for network troubleshooting.

For more info on CALEA and what the phone networks need to comply with (by law) take a look at http://www.askcalea.net/. This is US info, but the technical info is pretty much the same in Canada, mostly for the simplicity of technical development. There may be some legal differences though.

Anyway, CALEA is way off the topic of network survivability and recovery which is the topic of the the original report.

Cheers
Victor