[1st-mile-nm] Fwd: A Ridiculous Failure of Critical Infrastructure

[Marianne Granoff]

The following email was posted to several lists earlier this morning. FYI

>Date:         Tue, 1 Dec 2009 00:54:22 -0700
>From: Matt Larsen
>Subject: A Ridiculous Failure of Critical Infrastructure
>
>
>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