Sunrise wants to switch off 3G mobile technology by 2025 at the latest. This gave Elmar Grasser, technical manager at Sunrise announced Tuesday on the sidelines of an industry conference in Bern.
The outdated technology of the late 1990s covers only a small portion of the mobile spectrum in the GSM network at Sunrise, Grasser said. After the complete shutdown of 2G, the end of 3G is now in sight: “We want to do it as early as possible.”
Swisscom had announced the end of 3G before the end of 2025. Disabling 3G more quickly to create more space for 5G in the network is no problem, says Swisscom boss Christoph Aeschlimann. You still have a few customers who would use 3G in their device, such as the SBB or emergency call organisations.
That is why the end of 3G was deliberately announced in 2021 to give these customers four years to switch. “We are sticking to this schedule,” said Aeschlimann.
There is no known date when Salt will stop.
3G is almost never used for data anymore
3G hardly plays a role for data anymore, says Sunrise manager Grasser. On the other hand, it is still used for voice telephony when 4G is overloaded.
The lion’s share of mobile communication at Sunrise is carried by 4G. The latest mobile communication technology, 5G, accounts for about a quarter of data traffic.
However, without 5G it would no longer work. “Without 5G, we would have a huge problem today. All data capacities would be completely exhausted,” continues Grasser.
This puts Switzerland in a good starting position compared to other European countries, but lags behind Asian countries such as China or South Korea. In China, more than half of mobile data is said to run over 5G.
5G expansion difficult
The reason for Switzerland’s lagging behind is the much stricter limits of the Radiation Protection Regulation (NISV) and the difficulties telecom operators face in finding new locations for GSM antennas. In some places, there are hardly any real estate owners who make their property available for a GSM antenna, Grasser said.
This makes it difficult to increase 5G coverage. With the fast variant of 5G, Sunrise now reaches 73 percent of the population, according to Grasser. If you want to expand this, you either have to set up new GSM antennas or reduce the power of 4G on the existing antennas.
When asked where the recent cyber-attacks came from, Grasser said, “It goes without saying that a lot of it comes from Russia.”
Grasser sees no new quality of DDoS attacks. However, the strength of the attacks increased enormously. More than 100 gigabits per second (Gbit/s) may have been used. To defend itself, Sunrise is working with parent company Liberty Global, but they are also in contact with Swiss telecom providers such as Swisscom and the responsible authorities.
No widespread failures
According to Grasser, Sunrise has a strong focus on network quality. To be prepared for a network data center outage, there is a redundant infrastructure at the network nodes and where customer data is stored. “If one data center goes down, another can take over without customers noticing.”
However, the Sunrise network has never been affected by widespread outages in the past five years. Of the total of eight network data centers, two could fail without any traffic loss. But that does not apply to the GSM antennas, which are not equipped for a longer power outage.
(dsc/sda/awp)
Source: Watson
I’m Ella Sammie, author specializing in the Technology sector. I have been writing for 24 Instatnt News since 2020, and am passionate about staying up to date with the latest developments in this ever-changing industry.
