A Ridiculous Failure of Critical Infrastructure

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: "Atkinson, Robert" <rca53 () COLUMBIA EDU>
> Date: December 1, 2009 2:54:52 PM EST
> To: CYBERTELECOM-L () LISTSERV AOL COM
> Subject: Re: A Ridiculous Failure of Critical Infrastructure
> Reply-To: Telecom Regulation & the Internet <CYBERTELECOM-L () LISTSERV AOL COM 
> >

> This is the sort of event that can start the dominoes falling toward  
> "more regulation." Network outages that effectively strand  
> individuals (read "voters") for any length of time is the one thing  
> that politicians and regulators can understand and react to, much  
> more readily than vague network neutrality, competition, technology  
> or pricing issues.  Network outages affect constituents immediately  
> and obviously so politicians and regulators will feel compelled to  
> "do something."  This instance won't be a triggering event but if  
> similar outages on a "critical infrastructure" occur on a regular  
> basis and make the news, pressure will grow and grandstanding  
> politicians will latch onto "saving the internet" as a great issue.   
> Service providers screw up like this at their own peril.
>
> Bob
>
>
> On 12/1/09 2:54 AM, "Matt Larsen - Lists" <lists () MANAGEISP COM> wrote:
>
> Some kind of combination of failure between Charter and Qwest has left
> tens of thousands of people in Nebraska without Internet and has
> disrupted the Internet and phone services for thousands more.    Right
> now, the outage is going on 12 hours and there is no ETA for repair in
> sight.
>
> The word coming down is that the outage is on a Qwest fiber, but it
> looks to me like both parties should be on the hot seat for not having
> the ability to route around the problem.    There was a four hour  
> outage
> on Charter a week ago that was caused by a fiber cut in Gothenburg,
> Nebraska.
> That one killed everything west of the cut, but it was small potatoes
> compared to this one.   Is this truly the level of performance that we
> can expect from our major Internet backbone providers?   It took me
> about 10 seconds to re-route my traffic to a backup provider - you  
> would
> think that a couple of multimillion dollar companies would be able to
> sort out a problem of this nature in a reasonable amount of time.    
> The
> small CLEC that I use for my backup connection had enough capacity to
> route around the problem and was even able to lend me a little bit  
> after
> 5pm when the traffic on their network (mostly businesses) dropped off.
> It isn't rocket science to figure out how to route around an outage.
>
> Almost as frustrating is that there was NO news about the outages
> anywhere except on the social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter).
> One TV station in Hastings, NE put up a short story on their website,
> but I got more news from the tweets and FB posts that people where
> posting from their cell phones than I did from anywhere else.   None  
> of
> the network outage sites have any news about this.
>
> Could this be a harbinger of things to come?   I am feeling pretty
> thankful right now that I have a choice in backbone providers and  
> that I
> kept a second one.   Diversity is a good thing, and this is a great
> example of why we need competition and multiple options for Internet.
>
> Matt Larsen
> vistabeam.com



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