Sunrise names shutdown date for 3G network: “We want to do this as early as possible”

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Sunrise wants to shut down 3G mobile technology by 2025 at the latest. This was announced on the sidelines of the Asut industry association’s Swiss Telecommunications Summit conference in Bern, by Sunrise technical director Elmar Grasser in an interview with the AWP news agency on Tuesday.

Grasser said the outdated technology of the late 1990s only covered a small portion of the mobile spectrum on Sunrise’s cell phone network. After the complete shutdown of 2G, the end of 3G is now in sight: “We want to do this as early as possible.”

Swisscom announced the end of 3G for the end of 2025. There is no known date when Salt will close.

3G is almost never used for data anymore

Grasser said 3G no longer plays much of a role for data. On the other hand, it is still used for voice telephony if 4G is overloaded. The lion’s share of mobile communications in Sunrise is carried by 4G. 5G, the latest mobile communication technology, accounts for about a quarter of data traffic.

However, it no longer works without 5G. “Without 5G, we would have a big problem today. All data capacity would be completely exhausted,” Grasser continues. This puts Switzerland in a good position relative to other European countries, but lags behind Asian countries such as China or South Korea. In China, more than half of mobile data would already work over 5G. .

5G expansion is hard

The reasons for Switzerland’s delay are the much stricter limit values ​​of the Radiation Protection Regulation (NISV) and telecom operators’ difficulties in finding new locations for mobile antennas. Grasser said that in some places there are almost no property owners, which makes their properties suitable for cell phone antennas.

This makes it difficult to increase 5G coverage. Grasser said that with the fast variant of 5G, Sunrise now reaches 73 percent of the population. If you want to expand this, you either need to install new cell phone antennas or reduce the 4G power on existing antennas.

No backlog of hacker attacks

While recent hacker attacks on Swiss websites like those of Parliament made headlines, Sunrise didn’t notice an extreme spike: “I haven’t seen any increased attacks lately,” Grasser said. These overloading attacks (called DDoS in technical language) were filtered out and led to nirvana.

The data of the overload attack tries to separate from the normal data traffic on a hacked website. You can quickly see where DDoS attacks are coming from, which websites they’re crashing, and filter them out – even if it means you risk fending off normal traffic. “It makes sense that most of them came from Russia,” Grasser said when asked where the latest attacks started.

No new attack quality

Grasser sees no new quality in DDoS attacks. However, the strength of the attacks has greatly increased. More than 100 gigabits per second (Gbit/s) may have been used. Sunrise is working with parent company Liberty Global to defend itself, but they are also in contact with Swiss telecom providers and responsible authorities such as Swisscom.

According to Grasser, Sunrise has a strong focus on network quality. To prepare for the failure of a network data center, network nodes and a redundant infrastructure where customer data is stored are located. “If one data center fails, another can take over without customers noticing.”

However, the Sunrise network has never been affected by widespread failures in the past five years. Two out of eight total network data centers can fail without any traffic loss. However, this does not apply to cell phone antennas that are not equipped for a longer power outage. (SDA)

Source :Blick