Internet has become a part and parcel of most of our lives. But I did not realize the extent to which I personally was dependent on the Internet till two days back when due to a major underwater cable breakdown in the Mediterranean sea, the Internet slowed to a crawl - well you can say it almost stopped. News reports say 60% of India was affected and over 70% of Egypt.
In India for instance, the three main service providers namely TATA owned VSNL, Reliance and Bharti Airtel Ltd were affected. The repair of the sea cables is expected to take a minimum of 10 days even when conducted on a war footing. According to news reports, the cable snag occurred near Alexandria, off the coast of Egypt on Wednesday affecting ILD and Internet traffic to Europe and the US.
Checking email which we all took for granted was a big chore with opening a single email taking close to an hour. Most sites were not accessible. It did not help that over 90% of the popular sites on the Internet are hosted on a server based in the United states with no cross continental mirroring plan to meet such a scenario.
An exception was Google search which did not see any slowdown because it has data centers in every part of the world and is prepared to meet such emergencies.
This makes me wonder if it is wise to be more and more dependent on the Internet for carrying out even the most mundane but critical tasks like banking, paying bills and booking tickets. Now a days, more and more people are working from the safe confines of their home. As days go by we are getting more and more enmeshed in the online world and acquiring alternate identities. And keeping the Internet fault tolerant is turning out to be a very important factor in our personal wellbeing.
3 comments:
war footing?
has militarism so overtaken our thinking that every emergency is a "war?"
This makes me wonder if it is wise to be more and more dependent on the internet
as opposed to using a more polluting and less efficient personal transportation? (for example, would you rather transport yourself to a travel agent's office for a routine airplane ticket booking?) if the private ISPs cannot provide reliable, redundant service, then the common-welfare interest should mandate an alternative, possibly on the public utilities model.
The title of your post is misleading -- the Internet is fault tolerant -- Not! Fault tolerance, obviously, in the eye of the beholder. The failure was not so much on behalf of the Internet, which, according to your post, stayed up. The failure was on behalf of the users who, it would seem, did not modify their behavior in accordance with the degraded capacity of the internet. Resiliency is a two way street.
I totally relate to your story. Being in Malaysia, almost every night I have faced with slow internet access. At least you have a reason to have slow internet, here all I get is "we are looking into it sir". Sigh...
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