North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Vulnerbilities of Interconnection

  • From: Iljitsch van Beijnum
  • Date: Mon Sep 16 04:44:46 2002

On Mon, 16 Sep 2002, Kurtis Lindqvist wrote:

> > I suspect its a balancing act between reducancy, survival (network)
> > and costs vs revenues.

> > not sure I'd call it a "poor job"  for not planning all possible
> > failure modes, or for not having links in place for them.

> It depends on your perspective and what you expect from the net and what
> you see it doing for you in the future.

That's a good question. Is the net really a criticial resource? If a life
gets saved through involvement of the internet, it is news. Lifes are
saved by calling for assistence through the telephone network every day
all over the world as a matter of routine.

Try ranking how bad the following outages would be: power, gas (for
heating and cooking), water, the phone network, radio/tv, the net. I think
radio/tv and the net would have to share last place.

> As we move more advanced services
> to the net, we will also expect much more from it

Sure, if you run telephony over IP, you'll want your IP to be as good as
you need your voice service to be.

> also in terms of crisis. Just like the net was one of the prime
> sources of information during 9-11.

It's not how much something is used, but how bad it would be to go without
it. During september 11th, the phone service didn't work very well, and
the internet did a lot better. I think just about anyone would have traded
the latter for the former in a second.

> In the event of a emergency, I would very much like to be as
> able to reach my bank via the net as walking into their offices.

Yes, because banks are such a critical resource when there is an
emergency...

> I do agree that it is a balance, but I am not so sure that everyone have
> realised this. I am not even sure that all the carriers that you would
> expect to have this planning have it...

When your OC3 goes down because nettles have grown into the telco's A/C
exhaust, you start getting cynical... And that was in the good old days
when business was booming. I'm sure they're cutting corners left right and
center at the moment.