Fiber cut in SF area

There are three solutions to the problem;

  B: Make the infrstructure so redundant that cutting things
     just makes you tired, but nothing hapens.

  C: Do nothing.

As the society becomes more and more dependent on the infrastructure
for electronic communication, my suggestion to policy makers has been
that it should be easier to imprison all the government officials of a
contry than knocking out it's infrastrcture.

-P

I certainly think this trailer is the most insightful thought of the day.

  When you're looking for backup comms, is it just going to be the ham radio operators and am/fm radio stations left if there were some outage? With tv having gone digital it's not possible to tune in and pick up the audio carrier anymore. Wartime and times of civil unrest the first thing you do is take over communication to the citizens. Without your internet^Wpodcast of the news, how will you know what is going on? If redundancy is sacrificed in the name of better quarterly earnings is it the right decision?

  this is not only interesting from a network operators perspective but from a governance perspective as well. I've not done any ham radio stuff for ~15+ years but do keep a shortwave radio around (battery powered of course).

  The first thing to happen will be the network will be severed. Look at what happened in Burma. Both their internet links were turned off, and not just taking down BGP, but the circuits were unplugged.

  - jared

> There are three solutions to the problem;
>
> A: Put a armed soldier every 150ft on the fiber path.
>
> B: Make the infrstructure so redundant that cutting things
> just makes you tired, but nothing hapens.
>
> C: Do nothing.
>
>
> As the society becomes more and more dependent on the infrastructure
> for electronic communication, my suggestion to policy makers has been
> that it should be easier to imprison all the government officials of a
> contry than knocking out it's infrastrcture.

  I certainly think this trailer is the most insightful thought of the
day.

  When you're looking for backup comms, is it just going to be the ham
radio operators and am/fm radio stations left if there were some
outage? With tv having gone digital it's not possible to tune in and
pick up the audio carrier anymore. Wartime and times of civil unrest
the first thing you do is take over communication to the citizens.
Without your internet^Wpodcast of the news, how will you know what is
going on? If redundancy is sacrificed in the name of better quarterly
earnings is it the right decision?

There is a problem with this thinking, so in case of an emergency you
expect to switch and change how you do things?! That will not work, as
we can barely make it work under *non_emergency_conditions*.

The strategy has too be that things contine to work as they used to do
even in an emergency.

  this is not only interesting from a network operators perspective but
from a governance perspective as well. I've not done any ham radio
stuff for ~15+ years but do keep a shortwave radio around (battery
powered of course).

Ham's can do orderwire, but not replace for example a IP network, if
you are lucky, you get kilobits on shoer wave with 10e-5 BER..

  The first thing to happen will be the network will be severed. Look
at what happened in Burma. Both their internet links were turned off,
and not just taking down BGP, but the circuits were unplugged.

The best netweok is the one that never works right, so you excercise
the redundancy all the time..

-P

Yo, Peter. You speak of "infrastructure" as if it was a monolithic thing.
  Why would you think that some localized NoCal fiber cuts would be taking out
  the whole countrys infrastructure?

--bill

If you are talking residential access, in the future when people work
from home, the study we did in 2000 came down to that you can only
loose 30 subs on a single-point-of failure tehing, and the
recomendation was to interlave them, so your neighbour would have
connectivity.

While on this, we have an even bigger problem, the impact of loosing
power is bigger, but their system has not gained the same amount of
complexity as ours in the last 100 years.. (the book from 1907 on
power-lines is still applicable.)

-P