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How Telcos and ISPs Are Preparing For a Pandemic
alphadogg writes "Network operators and IT professionals already worried about how hurricanes and financial meltdowns will impact their work lives can add another potential catastrophe to their list of concerns: a global pandemic. During a panel sponsored by the FCC in Washington, D.C. this week, representatives from telecom carriers and ISPs discussed what steps they've been taking to prepare for the mass outbreak of a disease such as influenza, and also described the needs and challenges they would have to meet to keep communications up and running during a major global crisis. The most important tool at ISPs' disposal during a serious pandemic, panelists agreed, was that of network and bandwidth management controls."
How, exactly, does a global pandemic affect a network? Why would they need network management tools in case of such an event?
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
Make sure you set up log rotation and make sure it works.
They're using their grammar skills there.
"The most important tool at ISPs' disposal during a serious pandemic, panelists agreed, was that of network and bandwidth management controls"
WTF? During a pandemic I should think most employees of an ISP will have far more important things to worry about (you know, trivial stuff like their families etc) than whether the network bandwidth is ok. FFS.
None of these points is unique to ISPs, and it's rather self-important of them to think that they will have any special requirements. In fact, what is more likely to affect them is the realisation, after the problems have cleared, that the business can run just as well with only half the staff doing their jobs - so the other half can be cut. Guess what? It'll be the ones who made it in to work who'll get retained.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
These guys don't have it figured out yet. The priorities are still: billing systems and still providing crappy customer service!
from taking advantage of the lack of law to loot store after store of intellectual property over bittorrent and other such pirate protocols?
This is clearly any responsible government's first concern! I'm outraged they are concerned with "bandwidth management"!
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
On a macro basis you are probably correct. However, on a micro basis things are less clear. To the nation, one dead taxpayer is just a lamentable as another. To you, it makes a big difference whether you die, or some other schmuck who didn't stay inside and wait out the pandemic dies. Each individual will try to maximize his own chances for survival.
--why?
It should be "What ISPs and Telcos Said When Asked" etc. It's called "response bias", that someone will have an answer to pretty much anything if asked, because the asking implies they should have an answer to provide. I'm betting most respondents didn't actually have any such plans or concerns, and those that did had them placed firmly in the PR department rather than anyplace that might know about and have an effect on operations.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
to make sure that prominent links to information such as the CDC guidelines while jackhammering in references to the fact that antibiotics don't work on viruses.
They should also research prepare obituaries for people other than Steve Jobs.
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
will start hyping some super bug of the year. Will it be SARS II, Super Spanish Bird Flu, or will it be another year where I get a bad cold for 3 - 4 days, get over it and move on without a flu shot.
Come on, these pandemic scares happen every fall and it's boy crying wolf at this point. History indicates that eventually they will be right, but will that be this year or in 50 years...
That being said, I can understand disaster planning and having a plan just in case. But it's that time of the year when all the 24 hours news outlets will start harping what will be the next killer flu that does not materialize.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
So, while we know that the Internet is designed to provide routing protocols that can handle damaged nodes and take them out of the loop, are we still building systems in place that depend on the Internet being able to move packets from A to B, in the midst of any sort of prolonged crisis?
Currently, real "main street" business already suffer when their net goes down even for half an hour, but that's usually when the last link between them and the ISP goes down.
But in a serious or prolonged emergency situation, I'd be more concerned about links in the middle going down.
So are people building safety systems (healthcare records, utility company systems, etc) that depend on the Internet working in order to do business? Just think of what happens when the phones go down and companies can't process credit cards... but much worse. How are these ISPs and Telcos even supposed to allow their network admins to work from home... if the net is down?
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How are these ISPs and Telcos even supposed to allow their network admins to work from home... if the net is down?
I suppose if they are knowledgeable enough they can SSH or telnet into work with direct dialup access.
That depends on if they still have modems laying around on both ends and that the phone system still works.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I think it's a great idea to protect such a critical resource during a time of crisis. It seems like the importance of networks are often undervalued in emergencies.
However, *dons a tinfoil hat* does anyone else see a potential for other uses of such crisis plans? Who gets to determine what a crisis is, and how an ISP is supposed to respond? While I am going to try to be optimistic and assume everyone behind this has good intentions, the implications for its misuse are scary.
Say that a bunch of people get pissed off at their government and revolt, peacefully protest, or whatever. Now instead of just calling out the riot police, the powers that be can simply flick off the switch for one of the most important tools for free speech and communication. Only "critical sources of information" such as Big Media news sites are available because "terrorists" are using the Internet to communicate.
I don't really think this will happen any time soon, but it's certainly something to think about.
It all depends on the bug in question. Not a doctor, but at a guess...
If it was something like Ebola, where you require person-to-person contact, you just wait until the affected people die/get-quarantined/etc and the bug dies off in general.
If it's something that can survive outside the human body for a short period of time, then we isolate ourselves and wait it out.
If it's something that can jump species easily and/or survive for long periods of time away from a host? We're pretty much in the shit, unless/until a cure, vaccine, and some sort of germicide/'viruscide' can be concocted.
Personally, and I think I can speak for most human beings: I'm not going to take the chance of becoming one of the statistics, all in the name of carrying on, you know?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Thats the second time I hear about big pandemic plans for this fall. The first one was the plan on creating one. Some people think, that this will be another cover up story, like 9/11 for explaining why the world economy collapses. Hmm.. Hope I'm just paranoid here.
Give me some (any) incentive, and I'll be happy to seed your content. I can't believe it's 2008 and no one has come up with some type of web services sitting on top of bittorrent. The Internet is designed to keep on chuggin' even if you tear it's arms & legs off. Yet these Masters of Information companies still use a centralized approach with their content. Bittorrent is The Perfect Application with respect to the purpose of the Internet & in dealing with a major disaster. I see it as those companies responsibility to anticipate and deal effectively with guaranteeing the availability of critical information to the public in a serious crisis.
"Such as influenza" my ass! They're preparing for an outbreak of zombies! It's a global marketing test, in addition to a way of dealing with people who use too much bandwidth!
Okay, so say some incredibly nasty communicable virus shows up tomorrow. We all go home and hide from each other. When exactly do we get to come out again?
Basement-dwelling Slashdotters are a big enough sample of conclusive evidence that they might as well throw padlocks on the doors and be done with it.
Is it just me, or is this convenient timing? If controlling bandwidth during a pandemic or similar crisis was their true concern, this topic would have be on the table 6 months after 9/11. The next question to ask is how does one make sure companies like Comcast don't apply these measures when there is no crisis?
Oh, I see.
So this is their excuse to filter BitTorrent and related high-bandwidth protocols.
Interesting strategy. It reminds me of censorship in the name of protecting children.
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You even mentioned the main driving force but fail to see the effect! All of those people NOT traveling and NOT meeting will be telecommuting instead. The demands on the networks will go up dramatically both for economic functions as well as the panicking chatter of the masses.
Not so much. the main bandwidth hogs these days are P2P and other miscellaneous downloading. The personal use the people make from work will just be transferred to their houses, rather than to work IP addresses The usage from a remote desktop isn't so great - particularly since most people don't type too fast, so the upstream/refresh traffic is low.
What could really kill it is if everyone decides that voice is no longer enough and they all start videoconferencing from home. However, they'll have to make sure they're dressed for that to happen ;-0
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Well first, you can outlast epidemics by hiding long enough. For you to get be likely to get infected you need a certain amount of the bug in circulation. If you wait till that strain has gone through you may dodge the bullet. (Think about people who are thirty who get a primary varicella (chicken pox) infection. They dodged that bullet for many years (often by chance) even though VZV is always out there.
Given the example of avian influenza, the time that you get infected also changes the likelihood that you will die. If there is a major first wave that kills large volumes, that would be the time to definitely want to avoid infection. First off, we have less chance of knowing the best treatments early on in an epidemic. Treatment of a new (or newly changed) illness is developed as we gain experience with it. For example, survival in the first wave of the AIDS epidemic was abysmal while now it is markedly better.
Secondly, when there are high volumes of patients in the initial wave, your chance of getting that ICU spot, omseltavir, or a ventillator should you need one are slim. If you get it later when the demand is less, you stand a better chance of having the resources necessary to give you the best chance of survival. In addition, until you get a cadre of health care providers who survived the infection, people will be less willing to get 'up close and personal' to provide you care.
So there is a definite advantage of not being in the middle of the big bulge of sick folks. Even if your infection is inevitable, you'd like to get it when we know more and have more resources mobilized. Plus if you wait long enough we might just get an effective vaccine.
The reality of the situation is much worse than that. Companies have been building their infrastructure around things like Just In Time Inventory and the like for a while. What this means is that your neighborhood shop has just enough stuff for maybe a week and then they run out.
When UPS went on strike you would have thought these folks would have learned their lesson that infrastructure is fragile and you better be ready to roll with it. Sadly, they did not. The result is any prolonged emergency that affects electricity or fuel supplies will doom many businesses, especially the smaller ones.
Also, the interdependence of our current infrastructure is incredible. We seem to have built a society on the idea that nothing bad ever happens. So that when it does everything goes at once.
All it takes is a little damage and it cripples the electric grid. Which then disables the fuel pumps for filling up the trucks needed to service the electric problems. Which then locks down all transportation in the area and makes everyone dependent on outside assistance. What? The state or federal assistance isn't coming because they are too busy elsewhere? Impossible. People will sit down and wait for help because they "know" it is coming. Real Soon Now we will all be saved. By someone. After all, someone has to help. They just have to.
Internet? I'd be a lot more worried about being trapped in a city with no food deliveries and no stockpile of food items anywhere within 300 miles.
One of the biggest problems with any drawn-out emergency is going to be information control. The government is going to want to tell people to do certain things and, if they are done, it will be better for everyone.
For example, staying off the phone. Not rushing out to the WalMart SuperCenter to get the last couple of loaves of bread. Stuff like that.
Unfortunately, a lot of these people are going to be looking at any "official" pronouncements as just so much self-serving BS. When some web site blog/chat forum/etc. says the government is out to kill as many people as possible so the Senators can each have 10,000 acre estates some will believe. When the same web forums say that if you don't want to starve you better join in the mob breaking into the WalMart SuperCenter, people will do so - even if the store was emptied two days before. Of course, all of the people in the mob will then catch whatever it is that is going around at the time - or just get injured further stressing the health care providers.
What are the chances of this not happening and everyone sitting at home listening to the government and doing what is best for everyone? Today, I'd say zero. I'd say that it would be better if the government said nothing at all - because lots of influential people will want to get on their soap box to dispute anything "the government" says, no matter how much sense it might make.
Avian flu coming to the US? Probably is, soon. When it hits, it is going to be a disaster and most people will follow whatever sort of "leader" they can latch onto. And the Internet is full of folks that will jump into that role. For better or worse. I'm expecting worse, myself.
Bird flu is not a worry. (as planned) Where is your mark on your arm from the small pox shot?
TechQ
The biggest effect would probably be the massive number of people who suddenly want to telecommute; either because they've been quarantined or because they want to stay at home and minimize the chances of coming into contact with someone who's sick.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
So, uh, no one here is talking about network monitoring or control, which is the whole issue of this story...
I am an engineer at an ISP, and I can tell you that we are not doing anything like this. I haven't even heard of this issue. We are just trying to keep our clients' dns servers running (they keep patching them and breaking them), and upgrading our fiber capacity (OC12 to gige, OC48 to 10gige).
Having said that, we use ssh and a web browser (Nagios) to control and monitor, so not sure what you would do to make that "pandemic proof". Of course, if the Nagios box can't talk to stuff, it can't monitor it, which is a weakness.
I've heard that this is a planned attack by Big Corporations and the WTO and US Government. :-)
Weaponized Avian Flu
I'd love to change the world but I can't find the source code.
It might be more useful if someone had connected hospital information together so that a pandemic is caught at it's earliest stages.
A couple of years ago my wife got severely ill nausea and vomiting. I took her in and they treated her and she was fine 24 hours later. But later I learned another hospital had seen 12 cases in the previous 24 hrs. My wife was the second at this particular hospital and one of 4 before we left the ER. But after talking to a friend of a friend who was a doctor I found out that about what was going on and he was unaware that they were seeing it at other hospitals. This was the first time I became concerned that hospitals were not communicating with each other and that if a more serious virus had broken out it would take them days instead of hours to figure out the extent of the problem.
And this wasn't just a run of the mill stomach virus, within about 2 hours she went from fine to totally incompasitated.
It makes me wonder how many of these cases of food poisoning could have been stopped, if hospitals were more communicative of cases they were seeing.
So I'm not really worried about bandwidth issues. By the time it becomes a bandwidth issue it's to late. The problem will kind of solve itself.
He who said 1,000,000 monkeys on 1,000,000 typewriters would eventually type the great novel, never saw an AOL chat room
I kept an open mind and read the article, then I get to the last paragraph on page one.
"In particular, Mayer said people would have to be told not to stream videos or use peer-to-peer technology that could clog the local network and prevent basic communications such as e-mail from getting through. While Mayer acknowledged that the network neutrality debate has made some carriers âoenervousâ about giving priority to certain traffic, he said in a true national disaster, the FCC would no doubt give carriers leeway to shape traffic to give vital Web communications the highest priority."
Boom, they want to kill p2p, and video. So basically your not going to be able to watch CNN on your TVUPlayer. Or Democracy now, or really any news.
No news, is divide and conquer folks.
These bastards should be making infrastructure for unlimited bandwidth and data!
These are our fucking communications.
Meanwhile ham radio has been tossed under the bus.
Journalists don't get to cover disasters.
We got to get these fuckers out of office, they are fucking everything up.
America needs to upgrade all of it's communications infrastructure, especially with energy being so costly, especially with all this government bank robbing, and war machine.
Oh fuck it. Tired of ranting and nobody fucking listening.
THE US IS GOING TO FUCKING HELL!
Does this mean 1 in 100 dying? 1 in 10? In common use, it's my understanding that people mean things like the Black Plague, Spanish Influenza and Smallpox. Diseases so nasty that everyone knew at least one person who had already died from it and were themselves at risk of dying from it at anytime. Diseases that killed at least 10% and sometimes more than 50% of the vulnerable populations.
TFA talks about monitoring tools to keep up with the load, being able to juggle bandwidth, edit hosted content to cope with increased bandwidth demands, remote administration and the like. That has an important spin-off consequence that I don't see being addressed. These tools would allow the survivors to handle the work load of those who were home sick or simply dead. Being able to do that for an emergency period of a few weeks is one thing, but if the tools are sufficiently capable to handle it for months, why would the company ever hire replacements for those who died? The survivors will have proved that they could handle the work load, even under higher than expected demand. Furthermore, being able to do this remotely only makes off-shoring even easier. (In fact, I'd argue that a _good_ *demic plan would HAVE to include an off-shore team as part of your fall-back plans. Doing so would essentially allow the company to re-route it's human workload around the epicentre(s) of infection much as it can already re-route traffic)
There is one aspect of this that I *don't* see being talked about, one that the military has built into it's very structure and that is inheritance of authority. I work for an I.T. services company, one that has a comparatively small staff. If I died, my supervisor or the president/owner of the company would have little trouble recovering data or assuming control over my sphere of responsibility. However, the reverse is not true. If my boss's boss dies, at present we have no easy way to assume control. If only my boss dies, the president can delegate the deceased's duties onto me, but short of a password list kept in the tape safe, we have no way of taking over the presidents job. Given the level of access the owner/president has to the systems of our clientele, security procedures prohibit the tape safe option. (since I could access that list at anytime without leaving a trail.) I suppose we could contact each of our clients directly and get each of them to create new accesses for my supervisor or myself, but we can't guarantee that the person who has the ability to do that would be alive to do so. Worse yet, with a few of our clients, creating a new administrator level access would be something _we_ would normally be doing for them. They have people with the authority/permission levels to do so, but not the technical know-how.
The (sort of) good news is that, if 30%-50% of the people around here are sick or dead a lot of our customers probably wouldn't exist anymore anyway.
I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj