> We hear it all the time. “Don’t worry about the Internet if the grid goes down. The Internet was designed to survive thermonuclear war.” Unfortunately, the

> We hear it all the time. “Don’t worry about the Internet if the grid goes down. The Internet was designed to survive thermonuclear war.” Unfortunately, the original design of the Internet was based on conventional, hard-wire phone lines that were surprisingly resilient to catastrophic failures. Today’s Internet is different. It’s a swamp of wireless modems, ethernet cables and numerous other devices dependent on a stable infrastructure that is both complex and fragile. Is there any truth to this? There's a bunch of obvious technical errors (surviving nuclear war was never a design goal of the Internet, backbones have been fiber-optic since 1987, not clear why ethernet cables are supposed to be less reliable than telephone cables). Wireless is of course easier to interrupt than wired, but in most places last-mile links are still hardlines. The real issue is that you need power and a functioning service provider, but that's always been true.