Fiber cut in SF area

Tue Apr 14 01:41:25 UTC 2009

> > 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