
Our fancy Internet infrastructure operates on a wire and a prayer - vaksel
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=16136
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mechanical_fish
Seems to me that this article abuses the word "destroy". Nobody _destroyed_
the Internet with a hacksaw. They took a portion of it temporarily offline.

And "prayer" has nothing to do with it. The telcos know how this works. They
have procedures for dealing with it. For "a prayer", substitute the words
"teams of repair techs standing by at all hours", and "a detailed cost-benefit
analysis of various breakdown scenarios".

And it's a boring exercise to make a list of possible countermeasures without
also including that cost-benefit analysis. Yeah, in a fantasy world where
equipment and people were free, we could install a proximity detector inside
every manhole and create a national organization of rapid-response security
people to monitor those sensors. That might capture some saboteurs. Or at
least make for great security theater. But at what cost? Might it not be
easier to just fix these incidents as they occur?

~~~
lutorm
The problem with that cost-benefit analysis is that a lot of the cost is _not_
borne by the telcos. The entire UC Santa Cruz campus (as well as most of the
city of Santa Cruz) had no internet or telephone connectivity for a day. What
do you think the productivity loss from that is? And how much will AT&T pony
up? Answer: zero.

The issue is not with detecting manhole intrusions, even though that's what
everyone's talking about. The real issue is who the ---- thought routing all
internet, land line, cell phone and 911 traffic for all of Santa Cruz through
one fiber was a good idea.

When someone's site goes down due to a hard drive crash and it turns out they
had no backup, the _kindest_ response would be something like "that sucks
dude, but how the ---- could you not have a backup?" I don't see why the
requirement should be anything less for a major telco.

And don't even get me started on the reliability of Santa Cruz power...

~~~
mechanical_fish
I note for the record that your comment is _much_ better than the original
article.

The various private monopolies that control our telco infrastructure are a big
problem. We pay a lot of money for unreliable and substandard service.

------
jballanc
Interesting...this is the first I'm hearing of a Bay Area network outage. Then
again, I think that's kind of the point! I was always taught that packet
switching was designed such that, if Chicago got nuked, network traffic could
still get from New York to L.A.

I don't recall anything about the packet switched network preventing Chicago
from being wiped off the map. In other words, electrical grid: vulnerable! A
branch drops on a power line in Ohio and the entire East Coast goes
black...not good. The internet: not so vulnerable! Fiber optic cable gets cut
in Silicon Valley and the CEO of a tech reporting site complains but I don't
even notice from my apartment in NYC.

