Since yesterday afternoon (UTC+01:00) many of our rural Internet customers started complaining about the quality of our service. Low transfer speeds, loss of connection. No fun for anyone in Eastern Poland who wasn't lucky enough to get fibre (surprisingly, fibre coverage in rural areas is pretty good compared to the US or UK – most of it was built with money from the European Union). But fibre can't reach everywhere, and this is where we come in. But the last 24 hours were hell, and we don't know when this will end, although we know the cause. Let's start the story with those two Russian saints from the 11th century, Boris and Gleb. 1/n
All we know about them is pure speculation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_and_Gleb). But I didn't have the time to go deep into their story – I was too busy dealing with calls from customers, most of them worried, a few angry. But Boris and Gleb, having been martyred together, according to the legend, gave the name to a town founded some 600 years after their death, Borisoglebsk. Russia had a military air base there, and for some obscure reason they gave the name Borisoglebsk to an electronic warfare system, Borisoglebsk-2 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borisoglebsk-2). I wonder if there was a Borisoglebsk-1, but I have many calls to answer and no time to do research. 2/n
For most people GPS is about location, but for the telecommunications industry it's mostly about timing. I'm a small last-mile operator (that mile often goes up to 11 kilometres, sometimes even 20) and I don't own or have access to the base transceiver stations (BTS, but not the famous one) – keeping them running is on the shoulders of our infrastructure operator. Loss of GPS signals means that the very precise clocks on almost two dozen BTSs, most o them 40 metres tall, start falling out of sync. This leads to signal quality deterioration and eventually BTSs failing. 4/n
This map of the Polish border with Belarus and Ukraine shows how strong GPS jamming was on 2024-01-16 (https://gpsjam.org/?lat=52.64960&lon=24.97322&z=6.1&date=2024-01-16). The site https://gpsjam.org is updated every 24 hours, so we still have to wait to see how bad it was today. 5/n
Of the many customers who called most were civil and understood the situation. All they can do, I said, is to financially support the defence of Ukraine. One person asked who will reimburses their losses. They pay less than one dollar per day, and there's a clause about force majeure, and I don't give a fuck if they don't extend their contract. I should have told them to take their complaints to Moscow. 6/?
@szescstopni that's hilarious. I mean, it's not, but it falls into that category of things that is terrible/embarrassing/arduous to live through but is hilarious as a story, though I think it's the way you tell it
One of the things Borisogleb-2 does is jamming GPS signals, usually necessary for drone operations, at which Ukraine seems to be much better than Russia. A report published yesterday by the Institute for the Study of War Russia describes how Russia jams GPS to gain advantage over it's enemies (https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-january-18-2024). 3/n