BBN (GTE) Suffers another major power problem.

Fri Aug 8 17:21:33 UTC 1997

On Fri, 8 Aug 1997, John Curran wrote:

> At 11:39 8/8/97, Robert T. Nelson wrote:
> 
> >If you're in a 24x7, customer-driven market, you should have either:
> >
> >a) enough go-juice (via fuel contractor) to go until the grid is on-line
> 
> Did you read the previous email from jhawk?  There is an
> extremely large generator at one of the affected facilities
> (read: cogeneration plant) but no amount of fuel helps if
> the plant is damaged in the explosion.

I have dug through my nanog mail, and I don't see that. If I didn't look
hard enough, I apologize. (I did go through the last 2 days of mail)

/Power outages/ are one thing, **exploding power plants** is a bit
different story. That it something that is considerably more difficult
(and expensive as Sean points out) to prepare for and/or prevent.
(I wouldn't have made the comment I did had I known /this/). 

I like, Sean, would have trouble investing (today) in a company that had
that level of engineering redundancy. On the other hand, a day in the not
too distant future will require that. 

As more and more companies come to rely on the Internet like they rely on
the PSTN, we will be expected to have bomb-resistant networks. (not
bomb-proof, mind you), and we will have to be compensated for this level
of redundancy. This will day will come as we place more financial
transactions on the 'Net. This brings us to a point of "no net = no
income". I don't expect that any company connected to the Internet who is
not performing a large amount of monetary transactions will want to pay
for that level of redundancy. 

Furthermore, this outage was not a backbone PoP, and companies I describe
above would probably elect to connect to a backbone node. 

Rob Nelson
rnelson at internoc.com