The Communications Perspective on Recent News Topics

Last weekend, the BBC news sent a reporter and camera crew to accompany members of the Kosovo Liberation Army inside Kosovo. The BBC news report explained that KLA forces were locating Serbian arms caches and other forces, then telephoning NATO directly using cellular phones. The television news report showed KLA members using ordinary handheld cellular phones to report their findings. In a recent ARRL Letter, the ARRL asked at the end of the letter if any readers were aware of ham radio operations in Kosovo – my own guess is that there are none. Digital cellular phones have made clandestine communications a simple matter, particularly since the Serbs probably lack the time or equipment to trace locations of the callers. I would think that direction finding on a GSM signal would be difficult because (1) a specific call is just one time slot out of 8 in this time division multiple access system, and (2) GSM calls are moved around amongst the carriers to provide frequency diversity, providing sort of a "slow hop" effect. I’m sure it can be done, but not with your typical direction finding equipment.

NATO reported today (April 22) having "degraded" the communications in Kosovo such that only 50% of bandwidth to and from Kosovo was available. Considering the use of celphones by the KLA, obviously, NATO will not want to totally degrade the telecommunications system! With perhaps 50% to 75% of the population of Kosovo out of the country or homeless, even a 50% reduction in bandwidth still leaves plenty of bandwidth for voice and data.

NATO reports that they have destroyed various Serbian television and radio broadcast centers to shut down Serbian "propaganda" broadcasts. The day before, CNN reported that accesses to their web site from Yugoslavia had increased dramatically during the war such that they were receiving a page hit from Yugoslavia once every ten seconds. The report also noted that other news web sites, including the BBC, had reported similar and very large (typically an order of magnitude larger) web traffic coming from Yugoslavia. According to Jim Maceda, a reporter for NBC, the Serbian TV system carries BBC, CNN and Sky news channels and the people of Yugoslavia are watching the same news we are seeing. Press photos of Yugoslavia and Kosovo showed numerous small dish antennas for receiving satellite TV and radio signals. Personal opinion: In this Internet age, with Yugoslavia reportedly having a state of the art, buried fiber optic communication infrastructure, and with many people having access to the Internet, plus the widespread use of satellite TV, I wonder how effective the Serbian "propaganda" machine really is, and how effective NATO’s efforts to cut off communications really are. 

The advent of wide spread digital cellular telephony, satellite TV, and distributed, re-routable Internet services  challenges the effectiveness of bombing communications facilities. Taking out a single central office will no longer suffice – now it’s a matter of taking out numerous celphone towers and mobile switching centers too. Taking out the entire communication infrastructure of a region may be impossible in the era of nearly infinite bandwidth and substantial redundancy. When the TV stations go off the air, people turn to the Internet - or satellite TV.

In other news: Iin Littleton, Colorado, Fox News reports that cellular phones are often unusable due to the present high usage of the cellular system in the aftermath of the Columbine High School massacre. The success and widespread usage of cellular has choked its effectiveness for large disaster situtations. The same thing happened a year ago when Grand Forks, North Dakota was devastated by floods. Interestingly, school districts that have long banned cellular phones (cellular phones are obviously evil) are now reconsidering those policies.