It is the worst-case scenario that is considered and anticipated. In the event of power cuts or during load shedding for a few hours, all the country’s fixed and mobile communication networks could go offline. Consequence: a society and an economy at a standstill because suddenly deprived of telephone and Internet.
“We warned the government about the risks in February and we have been working with the State services for several weeks”, recalls Michel Combot, the Director General of the French Federation of Telecoms (FFTélécoms). “There is real concern about rotating load shedding that is not easy to anticipate”, he underlines, regretting the strategy of “cuts suffered in leopard spot mode rather than targeted on territories”.
The government will send a circular to the prefects to anticipate and prepare the departments for possible scheduled cuts in electricity supply, which could affect 60% of the population, but no critical site or priority customer. Problem: “Telecom networks are not considered a priority and the mobile antennas would therefore no longer be supplied”, points out the representative of the operators. However, it’s a safe bet that the network will be extremely busy since in the event of a cut at home, ISP customers will want to compensate for the extinction of their box by attempting connection sharing.
A two-hour load shedding would result in the cessation of mobile coverage in an area and, by extension, the impossibility of contacting loved ones but also emergency numbers such as 17, 18 or 112. urban areas, the signal could switch to the nearest antenna spared by the cut with a high risk of saturation. In rural areas, the distance between the relay antennas, despite a good mesh, should bury the chances of hooking up a mobile network.
Some operators have sites equipped with batteries with an autonomy of 10 to 30 minutes designed to manage micro-cuts “but they would not last long if everyone requests them at the same time when the others are no longer responding” summarizes a manager of an operator. The idea of using backup generators is out of the question. “They are intended to fill small local breakdowns and weigh more than a ton so they are difficult to install everywhere and in a very short time,” sweeps away Michel Combot.
The data centers are themselves, a priori, spared by the problem of outages because “there are business continuity plans which are put in place and tested regularly with the entry into action of fuel-powered generators which take the relay to power our servers, as the competition also does,” we explain at OVH. Your precious data will therefore wisely wait for the return of the “juice” to be accessible again.