The Neighborhood » Carl

COMMUNICATION

Cellular technology — is based on a number of essential elements, which enable cell phones (with a unique SIM card) to talk to the cell stations (towers) for a particular carrier. When the cell phone initially connects to the network, it finds and hand-shakes with a nearby tower. As the phone moves around, it gets transferred to a new tower so the connection is never dropped. Given distance and speed can vary for each phone, this transfer protocol is both somewhat complicated and mathematically beautiful. But the important part is simply each phone has a unique ID that a carrier’s network recognizes, connects with, and bills the account for.

We have a couple hundred different SIM cards in our team’s cellular phones and cell-based internet routers. Each of these SIM cards have a unique ID (IMSI), and the software in the phone or modem does the connection to an appropriate tower near the Boardwalk compound. Unfortunately for us, the stations are computers and carriers can use them to both identify what phone is connecting to what tower, and to disable that connection. Given our phones were all physically stationed at Boardwalk, there would only be a half-dozen plausible towers per network they had to monitor. We appear to be very bad at hide-and-go-seek. ❦

Our phones started disconnecting — at Noon on Wednesday. They kept mine open just to tease (or maybe ‘respect’) me, which made me doubt whether Stanford and Dr. A. knew what was going on. Although not all the cellular modems were online, we expected maybe a few hours at best when they came up. We had a couple days of communication before we were completely blacked out. ❦

Communication is essential — which is why we had at least

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two solutions to this blackout problem. The less reliable but more communicative solution was C1 and C20. These two containers contained three important things: (1) cellular antennas, (2) computers, and (3) a large bank of SIM cards. I ‘stole’ this idea from companies in China and elsewhere that provide virtual SIMs to people who would prefer to pay local vs. international cell-phone rates. As in… pretty much everyone except Larry and Elon.

Each of the containers had a bank of a thousand SIM cards, which the computers could use with the antennas to talk to cell towers up to 45 miles away (as the crow flies). This blanketed the Bay Area, and enabled these ‘bay area telecommunications – phones’ to hop towers from Oakland to Menlo Park (F), San Francisco down to Cupertino (A), Gilroy to Sunnyvale (A), Berkeley to Los Gatos (N), and Pleasanton to Mountain View (G). Yes, the router could pretend to be an employee traveling to any of the FAANG companies. Representing three trillion dollars. With revenues a bit smaller than the economy of Canada. And that was just five companies in the area.

Identifying what SIMs were actual employees, and what SIMs were our virtual employees, would be almost impossible. We moved the Bay Area into a version of the matrix… or maybe more aptly SimCity.

With the BAT phones we believe we could last for months before anyone would consider shutting down the whole Bay Area communication grid. And this was our less-reliable solution. ❦

More reliable communication — comes from no communication at all. That might sound like an oxymoron (‘silent communication’), but it is not as long as the two parties had plenty of time to work out the protocol ahead of time.

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Our super-reliable communication technique was a delay & cancellation protocol between Boardwalk, the various remote cave dialysis cells, and the broader collection of vampires on the V-WAN. We had arranged plans for every party, and Boardwalk could only delay or cancel activities by these other parties. If Boardwalk went silent, the other parties already had the plan. Boardwalk used the wrong keyword, they already had the next activity to do. Boardwalk couldn’t direct field activities beyond applying delay tactics. And even then, we had to use the right keywords or it would be ignored. The future was almost inevitable, like playing chicken with an accelerator but no steering wheel.

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