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Transatlantic Cable Fault Disrupts Internet In UK
An anonymous reader submits "Web traffic between the U.S. and Europe has been hit after an undersea cable developed a major fault on Tuesday. Because the TAT-14 cable network is shaped like a ring, it should be able to cope with one such failure -- but unfortunately the consortium that owns it hadn't fixed an earlier problem, just off the U.S. coast. Just shows how systems with build-in redundancy can still go badly wrong...."
Imagine... some big cable that's thousands of miles long connecting continents...
That's just a weird idea. You gotta wonder who makes those things and how, exactly, they're maintained. Let alone set up in the first place. Do they just sit along the ocean floor? Are they suspended in mid-water? I have absolutely no idea. Just mind-boggling to me, the logistics of it.
i'm amazed that i survived - an airbag saved my life.
My guess is that the initial problem may have been an undersea cable. Those generally take 2 or more weeks to fix, and if the weather is really bad, they have to pull the boats back in, delaying things further.
No evidence, of course, but it seems like the most logical reason. Cables like the TAT-14 don't stay unfixed just because someone in management is lazy.
Just shows how systems with build-in redundancy can still go badly wrong...."
Um, the built in redundancy worked as it should, apart from the maintainers not fixing the first fault. Their maintenance is what went wrong. Nobody will ever be able to afford or build a system like this with so much redundancy that you aren't required to maintain it.
A computer without Microsoft is like ice cream without ketchup.
"Just shows how systems with build-in redundancy can still go badly wrong...."
No, it shows how well designed redundancy can be overcome by bad management decisions! Engineering brought low by bean counters... Gee, when has that ever happened before?!
Any technology distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
The real problem is in the design of networks. Information networks are designed to be fault-tolerant (famously but erroneously attributed to a desire to withstand nuclear attacks) -- multiple connections and a "mesh" network mean that if nodes break, traffic is routed elsewhere and the network continues to function. This works great, and there's no problem with it. But the problem is, humans don't build networks this way, and economics is against doing so.
If you're buying a network connection, you buy it from the best provider available, which naturally means network connections become concentrated to a few suppliers, who in turn find economies of scale and provide lower prices, thus attracting more customers. Thus the economics of building networks naturally produces networks that have a few or even single points of failure: we noticed this on September 11th, when the knockout of the huge links through New York noticeably slowed transatlantic traffic, even to sites other than CNN and the other news sites that were being toasted by demand at that point. Centralisation is something that we naturally do because it's economically efficient, but centralisation leads to problems for networks.
In the energy sector, things are even less flexible, because energy connections are a lot more expensive to set up and difficult to maintain than information links. The US powercut was caused by the cascading failure of a daisy-chain of power stations around the great lakes. Nobody would build an information network that way any more, but it's still the natural way to build a power network. Italy's powercut was caused by a huge reliance on foreign power, supplied by JUST TWO LINKS to France -- one fell over, instantly overloading the second and knocking it out too.
Yes, we are critically reliant on these fragile networks. And yes, economic realities tend to cause these problems, but not because of privatization: it's simply because humans naturally tend to build poor networks, because those are cheaper -- no matter who pays the bills. To solve the problem, we need to pay more attention to networking theory when building all of our networks, and provide regulatory incentives to build better networks of both kinds.
Or one day, a critical failure will cause a cascading catastrophe, and it will be nobody's fault. We built the network to fail that way.
It isn't like the US-side fault was just being ignored: "According to BT, the US-side fault should be fixed by the end of this week, which will bring the cable network online again." Given the logistics of repairing a fault, and without knowing when the US-side fault occurred, it is difficult at best to imply that the cable operators were somehow negligent in their actions.
From the story: Just shows how systems with build-in redundancy can still go badly wrong
Well, build-in redundancy is just there to let you some time to fix problems before disrupting activity. I mean, if I don't change HDD A on my RAID-1 Array when it is reported to be defective, there is no point in having a RAID-1 Array. The company in charge is responsible. The "build-in redundancy" did its job fine. They just shouldn't have installed a system with redundancy if they didn't plan on fixing non-disruptive problems.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
An amazing guy - he'd be so depressed if he came to Britain today, not only do we no longer have the fastest trains in the World, but our fastest trains are French and Italian! What he'd say about the West Coast Main Line rebuilding taking longer than the construction of the Great Western is anyone's guess. But he'd find the fact we'd built the fastest airliner then scrapped it for something slower incomprehensible.
One slight correction. Great Eastern was the third of Brunel's ships. The first, Great Western was the first ship to steam commercially across the Atlantic in April 1838 (she was beaten to being the first steamer fulls stop, by two days by Sirius although that ship was too small for commercial traffic).
His second was Great Britain launched in 1843 and was the first large iron ship and the first to be powered by a screw. She is now preserved in Bristol and is well worth a visit.
Great Eastern was the third and largest by far.
As you say, his range was phenomenal. To produce one revolutionary ship would have been achievement enough, but three? Had he just done ships that would have been a monumental achievement - but to build the World's fastest railway, the World's first large iron building (Paddington station), a series of monumental suspension bridges, flat-pack hospitals, stations, tunnels...
Incredible.
And his monument? If you travel across the Royal Albert Bridge between Devon and Cornwall - a bridge so revolutionary that its only recently been proven how it stands up - look up, its there in 6 foot letters.
I.K. BRUNEL
ENGINEER
1859
What a guy!
Best wishes,
Mike.