This morning on boingboing I noted that there have been all sorts of outtages at two of the biggest Internet backbones. I didn’t think much of it at the time, since my own access at work and home was working — aside from some sites being slow.
A little later in the morning I was scheduled to do a phone interview with Morgan Jindrich of the Consumers Union, which she decided to do from her home office. I called her and the connection was horrible — like a bad webcast with lots of lost. Through all the digital hash I could just barely understand her telling me that she’s using Vonage VOIP, which appeared to be the source of the problem.
So, I called her back on her cell, which was better (but cells are never ideal for phone interviews — their quality is typically lower than the 100+ year-old land-line technology). She told me that network connectivity, including telephone, has been rotten all week at her office in DC. And, obviously, it was pretty rotten at her house outside the city, today.
This minor episode just sort of highlights for me the problem with having all of our communications pumped through the same pipe. A single-point of failure is never a good thing.
So imagine you get your phone, TV and data over your broadband line-some of you probably already do. What happens when that broadband is down, either locally or with one of the big backbones?
Is our broadband infrastructure ready to become THE communications network that we depend on for everything? Are the companies providing that backbone truly responsible and trustworthy enough?