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Seems to me that this article abuses the word "destroy". Nobody destroyed the Internet with a hacksaw. They took a portion of it temporarily offline. And "pray

Seems to me that this article abuses the word "destroy". Nobody destroyed the Internet with a hacksaw. They took a portion of it temporarily offline. And "prayer" has nothing to do with it. The telcos know how this works. They have procedures for dealing with it. For "a prayer", substitute the words "teams of repair techs standing by at all hours", and "a detailed cost-benefit analysis of various breakdown scenarios". And it's a boring exercise to make a list of possible countermeasures without also including that cost-benefit analysis. Yeah, in a fantasy world where equipment and people were free, we could install a proximity detector inside every manhole and create a national organization of rapid-response security people to monitor those sensors. That might capture some saboteurs. Or at least make for great security theater. But at what cost? Might it not be easier to just fix these incidents as they occur?

lutorm 18y ago
The problem with that cost-benefit analysis is that a lot of the cost is not borne by the telcos. The entire UC Santa Cruz campus (as well as most of the city of Santa Cruz) had no internet or telephone connectivity for a day. What do you think the productivity loss from that is? And how much will AT&T pony up? Answer: zero. The issue is not with detecting manhole intrusions, even though that's what everyone's talking about. The real issue is who the ---- thought routing all internet, land line, cell phone and 911 traffic for all of Santa Cruz through one fiber was a good idea. When someone's site goes down due to a hard drive crash and it turns out they had no backup, the kindest response would be something like "that sucks dude, but how the ---- could you not have a backup?" I don't see why the requirement should be anything less for a major telco. And don't even get me started on the reliability of Santa Cruz power...
- mechanical_fish 18y ago
  I note for the record that your comment is much better than the original article. The various private monopolies that control our telco infrastructure are a big problem. We pay a lot of money for unreliable and substandard service.

lutorm 18y ago

The problem with that cost-benefit analysis is that a lot of the cost is not borne by the telcos. The entire UC Santa Cruz campus (as well as most of the city of Santa Cruz) had no internet or telephone connectivity for a day. What do you think the productivity loss from that is? And how much will AT&T pony up? Answer: zero. The issue is not with detecting manhole intrusions, even though that's what everyone's talking about. The real issue is who the ---- thought routing all internet, land line, cell phone and 911 traffic for all of Santa Cruz through one fiber was a good idea. When someone's site goes down due to a hard drive crash and it turns out they had no backup, the kindest response would be something like "that sucks dude, but how the ---- could you not have a backup?" I don't see why the requirement should be anything less for a major telco. And don't even get me started on the reliability of Santa Cruz power...

mechanical_fish 18y ago
I note for the record that your comment is much better than the original article. The various private monopolies that control our telco infrastructure are a big problem. We pay a lot of money for unreliable and substandard service.