What if Russia destroys Ukraine’s cell networks

As Taliban insurgents fended off US-led forces in their battle for Afghanistan in the late 2000s, local warlords decided that the nation’s mobile phone network was becoming an unacceptable risk. So they shut it down.
Sometimes the outages in Afghanistan were only during the night or sporadically enforced. Quite often, though, the Taliban simply blew up cellphone masts so that they could never be operational.
These tactics and a similar pattern of attacks in places from Nigeria to Colombia to Somalia over the next decade serve as a warning to Ukrainians as they face a Russian invasion. Yet new tools developed in that time will likely provide a way to outmaneuver the Russian forces and allow a resistance to keep communicating even if conventional cellular networks and internet connections are taken down. Other conflict zones will take note: With mobile telephony now ubiquitous in both developed and emerging nations, a civilian with a cellphone has as much ability to share crucial intelligence as a trained military radio operator.
Today’s cellphone infrastructure is built on a hub-and-spoke model where a system of towers and servers acts as the go-between. Destroying a single tower can bring down the entire network, cutting off large swaths of users. That vulnerability has spurred a move toward decentralised communications, where cellphones or other devices connect without relying on a primary hub. Called mesh networks, these systems are already popping up in parts of Ukraine, and have the potential to become the foundation for both military and civilian communications while the country is under Russian assault. The opening two weeks of Russia’s invasion have already highlighted weaknesses in the aggressor’s tactics in the face of local forces that have moved nimbly to coordinate attacks on tanks, aircraft and supply trucks, an approach well-suited to decentralised communications.
“The Russian war machine doesn’t do very well with decentralised command and control,” said Nathan Rijckmans, a former paratrooper in the French foreign legion and now a product manager at communications supplier Domo Tactical Communications, or DTC, a unit of Australia’s Codan Ltd “Instead of cutting off the head of the snake, they’re suffering right now because there are hundred little snakes they’re trying to find.”
Rather than quickly move to take out Ukraine’s cellphone towers, Russian forces have largely left them intact. One explanation, Rijckmans said, is that Moscow may instead seek to use the existing infrastructure for its own communications and to wage information warfare on local residents.
Whether invaders destroy the cellphone and internet infrastructure or leverage it for their own purposes, a population remains vulnerable without a backup. That’s where decentralised mesh networks come in.
DTC and rival goTenna Inc are among the companies that sell equipment that can form ad-hoc networks of handsets that eschew a centralised server. If one device in the group is put out of action, the rest can continue communicating. The approach also allows for a large area of coverage using lower-power devices. Advantages include longer battery life and greater stealth against attackers locking in on signals to hunt their enemy. While Elon Musk generously donated a truckload of his Starlink satellite base stations to Ukraine, that kind of equipment emits a powerful and easily recognised radio signature that might be tracked by Russian forces.
Commercial mesh network systems do have disadvantages, namely the high cost of equipment and the need to quickly ship thousands of units in times of crisis rather than being able to relying on existing devices.
Standard smartphones with Bluetooth and an app are another feasible alternative. One of the first to take this approach was FireChat, an Android and iOS app developed by Open Garden a decade ago to help crowds at the Burning Man festival send messages directly when cellphone networks couldn’t cope with the heavy, highly concentrated traffic. Within a few years, it shot to fame as a tool for pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong to share information without being intercepted or blocked by the government. Bridgefy, a similar phone-based app, has become popular with Ukrainians in need of an alternative to centralised cellphone networks.

—Bloomberg