Blackout Worse For Internet Than Previously Thought?

An anonymous reader writes "Renesys (the people who previously brought you cool animated graphs of the US/Canada power outage has a new report out. It challenges the widely held belief that the Internet was largely unaffected by the power outage. Lots of important networks lost connectivity, including banks, hospitals, government organizations and investment funds. There's a cool appendix on the huge Italian power outage in September as well. They conclude that the Internet is not ready to be critical infrastructure."

Comments

Obvious?

[Huogo]

It has always seemed to me that the internet isn't all that de-centralized, but a few major companies ran most of the backbones. Since it isn't a huge ad-hoc network, most of the data for an area probably goes out through no more than 5 connections. Especially in rual areas, I wouldn't doubt that at least one routing station in each of those chains doesn't have good long term backup facilities.

Re:Obvious?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, duh. (Yes I did read the article) If 1/3 of the country goes out, we are sure as hell going to loose *some* connectivity.

Its pretty cool though that it can be observed in terms of routing activity.

Yes, ideally everyone would have backup power (and enough of it). If power outages were common, it might be a good selling point for ISPs, but they aren't so not many people want to may more $ per month just to have battery backup. (Especially residential customers who won't have it at home anyway).

I don't like big government either, but an FTC law (or whatever) mandating backup power for ISPs/backbones of sufficient size or type of service (business vs residenial) might be what's needed.

If phone companies have such a requirement, then the internet probably should to.

(Unfortunately, most phones are powered from the phone line, but I can't say the same about my cable modem...)

OTOH, did many businesses care to have backup power for sufficient length? Just because the some routers went out, it might not have mattered if their end users were already without power.

A robust internet is a great thing, but not near as great as a robust internet with robust users.

That's fine

[dschl]

They conclude that the Internet is not ready to be critical infrastructure.

Apparently, neither is the electrical network. Back to candles we go.

Ready or not, here we come.

[Dav3K]

Ready or not, the internet is increasingly being used for critical infrastructure. At best, failures like the power outage should motivate governments and industry to bolster the internet up to where it needs to be for reliability standards.

And the power system is?

[David Frankenstein]

Exactly how does one system's dependance on a critical infrastructure (the power grid) and it's failure when that infrastructure fails imply that it's not ready?

Re:And the power system is?

[shotfeel]

That was my question. The core of the conclusions seems to be,

"We find that Internet connectivity in the blacked-out region was far more seriously affected than has been publicly revealed."

Pointing out that areas without power didn't have internet connectivity seems rather redundant to me. The big question is how did it affect people outside that area? The fact that the rest of the world just plugged right along seems contrary to the conclusion they seem to want to draw.

Critical Infrastructure?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bah, I could have told you that. I work for an ISP that serves 15 states. I get calls from people who put 100% of their business into a DSL line - with no backup to other carriers or mediums. When a hardware failure or trunk line failure occures - they go postal.

Sorry, but uptime is not 100% never was, never will be - plan for it, or deal with it when your connection goes down.

Even though we have multiple connections to the backbone - local trunks can go down. Aka backhoe attacks on burried fiber, or dove hunters blasting pole run fiber (don't laugh - it happened last week). If you don't have a backup DSL,ISDN, or heck even dialup connection for your business - then stfu and wait while we repair.

And don't even get me started on residential accounts that call in 'I use this for work I need it up now - send someone out today.' And it's Sunday evening... no - you didn't pay for a business account, so you get residential service levels which include 24-72 hour turn around on repairs.

critical infrastructure

[Anonymous Coward]

If power *is* a critical infrastructure, and lack of power is what caused these problems, how can that support a conclusion that the Internet is not ready to be considered critical?

I'm not saying there isn't other evidence that would support such a conclusion, but the real failure here was the power infrastructure, upon which the net relied "critically" in the first place...

I'm not sure I agree with their conclusions

[jandrese]

The reason everybody said that the internet survived was that they were able to visit most of the sites they cared about during the blackout. The chart seems to show that many links and servers were down (presumably without power) during the blackout (including some major components of the internet), yet most people basically unaffected. This seems to suggest that as long as the server itself isn't in the middle of a blackout, the Internet can survive rather well. How many of your learned about the blackout from Slashdot or some other online news source?

Re: Power Outage

[bwh265]

Air Canada lost it's reservations/bookings/everything servers, and couldn't operate anything approaching normally for one reason. The servers were based in the midst of the blackout.
Out here on the left coast, there were no effects. So why, don't international org.s and government departments have duplicate facilities on independant grids? That's always bugged me.

bwh

Excuse me?

[sootman]

They conclude that the Internet is not ready to be critical infrastructure.

Huh? It would seem to me that the fucking power grid is not yet ready to be critical infrastructure but hey, here we are. Shit. There is nothing in the world (except for the sun, oceans, etc.) that is 100.00000% dependable.

Our top story tonight: humans, human inventions imperfect. Tomorrow: sky blue, water wet.