Hacker News Reader

Comment by somerandomqaguy | Hacker News Reader

There's a reddit thread going on that was discussing an interesting edge case in regards to 911 and the outage.

In Canada 911 service is accessible without a SIM card; if your phone doesn't have a SIM, any cell tower should in theory still accept and route the call as normal. However in Roger's case, because the cell towers and their authentication mechanisms were still operational, any 911 call with a Roger's SIM card in it would route through Roger's network and only Roger's network; the one that couldn't service any calls. In essence, your 911 service was completely cut off.

The workaround is to pull the SIM card prior to making the 911 call, but it leaves an interesting question about what you're supposed to do in an eSIM world where pulling the SIM is not possible but you're again in this kind of situation.

To be clear I don't know if this is a real problem or not, but it is an interesting thought either way.

View on HN

Even if you do have a physical sim card, finding sim card ejector isn't trivial, especially in a situation when you do need to call 911.

this! even a broken sewing needle is too thick. Arrgh.

ergo, I keep a spare ejector tool on my keychain for this very reason.

This. I keep one in between my (rubber) phone case and phone.

Though at this point we should just move to tool free sim slots like with Sony phones.

I carry a sim ejector in my wallet for just-in-case situations

A paperclip usually works in my experience.

I use one paperclip per week, and the only time I have one with me is when I'm doing that one thing on Monday morning. Other than that, there's one bowl full of them which is actually in the same room as the pile of miscellaneous stuff that includes the real sim ejector gadgets.

Heh, I never seem to have a paperclip handy even in non emergency situations

It has been several years since I've seen a paperclip.

I carry at least 2 paperclips with me (1 live, 1 backup). They don't add much to the space or weight of my EDC, but they can come in handy in the time of need.

> The workaround is to pull the SIM card prior to making the 911 call, but

The actual “but” clause is nobody is going to be able to diagnose the problem just from the terminal device. It’s like when our cable service goes down* the kids shout out “WiFi is down” (while to me it’s working fine).

* this happens a lot because I live in Palo Alto which, despite having deployed fibre close to every address in the city back in the 1980s was never able to actually, you know, deploy IP service.

Didn't actually put fiber close to every address. Maybe certain parts of the city but really not much.

I live in midtown where the city hasn't gotten around to undergrounding the wires. In theory that means it's easier to put in fiber. In reality it means no fiber and cable internet that get flaky when it rains or if the wind blows.

I think it’s officially within 1/2 a mile, but closer everywhere but the hills.

I looked at using the fiber to connect my house directly into the PAIX (I confounded an ISP years ago). PA was happy to rent me dark fibre which I could light up however I liked. They charged by the distance (I was about 1.5 km from the PAIX). IIRC it was going to be about $25K for the cap ex and then 2K/month to use it (plus my equipment). My wife sensibly said no.

The correct mitigation is a codification to REQUIRE (if this isn't already the case) the calls to go through. From a technical standpoint the failure to route to a given provider to terminate the call should be treated as an overflow and it should proceed down alternative service options, even from other providers.

FWIW it sounds like it's in the works now:

>Staffieri says Rogers has made meaningful progress on a formal agreement between carriers to switch 911 calls to one another’s networks automatically, even in the event of an outage on any single carrier’s network. He says the company is physically separating its wireless and internet services to create an “always on” network that meets a higher standard of reliability.

-https://vancouver.citynews.ca/2022/07/24/rogers-competitors-...

> The workaround is to pull the SIM card prior to making the 911 call

This may not work if Rogers is the strongest signal as the handset may latch to it despite its non-functional state.

And that’s for any handset without a SIM, an originally Rogers handset or not.

iirc you can always go to the phone’s settings app and change the carrier it connects to

For example, on iOS:

Settings > Cellular > Network Selection > Switch off Automatic

It didn't work, I tried to manually connect to other service providers (Roaming) and the connection was rejected. I liked to believe the others service providers automatically blocked Rogers customers to keep their service alive.

Update:Grammar.

His point was that you could do that for 911, not for actual roaming service.

I'm no expert but I feel like roaming still require some sort of "authentication" over the original network and obviously Rogers would have failed on that part.

I think that would work. Just tried it and while I got “zero bars”, going into field test mode showed I was sitting connected to another roaming network with limited service.

Can you not delete an eSIM?

See "Erase your eSIM": https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212780

Learn something new every day, I didn't know that was possible. I thought eSIM operated like the CDMA authentication.

It's just a normal SIM card internally on a flash chip.

on iPhone, at least, -- you can turn on/off the entire eSIM line.

I would think the best workaround (until carriers/handsets fix this) is to change your cell network - which you can also do if you have poor signal in an area: On iPhone, go to Settings > Cellular > eSIM name > Network Selection and turn off “Automatic”. Then pick a different network.

Admittedly, this is neither fast nor easy/intuitive. As pointed out in a sibling comment, the fault lies with Apple and Google for not forcing the 911 call on a different network after it fails.

The fix carriers are discussing sounds like finding a way to re-route 911 calls over other networks on the same tower, or some other failover mechanism. It’s not clear if that would be simpler than having a handset try again on a different network.

The work around makes no sense give zero knowledge about it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com