| Fragile communications infrastructure With power out in many areas our fragile communications infrastructure is brought to its knees. The only service that can provide communications both locally and over long distance is the Amateur Radio Service (Hams). Every year 35,000 people set up amateur stations under emergency conditions and operate them for 24 hours. Not only are these people experienced operators, if their equipment breaks they can repair it on the spot and adapt to different conditions.
The power companies want to take the spectrum allocated to the amateur service and operate a legacy broken technology when there are many better and faster alternatives. |
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 exocet_cmYou delete it, I'll find itPremium
join:2003-03-23
New Orleans, LA
kudos:2 | What about Civil Air Patrol? We own the largest communications network in the nation!!!!!!
*falls to his knees and morns cause nobody knows about CAP* |
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 tenbase
join:2000-07-19
Alexandria, VA | Yup, between CAP, MARS, and Amateur Radio, communications are pretty well covered.
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I would kill everyone on this forum for a drop of sweet beer.. |
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exocet_cmYou delete it, I'll find itPremium
join:2003-03-23
New Orleans, LA
kudos:2 | WOOHOO Somebody mentioned CAP |
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 The BeerI Love It When A Plan Comes TogetherPremium
join:2001-07-24
Atlantic, IA | reply to David95037
Then again if the power is out I doubt they will be transmitting data.
Just Kidding =) |
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 TA63ST215WPremium,MVM
join:2000-11-23
there
kudos:2 | reply to David95037
Cell phones were working near Toronto for the duration of the outage.
Power is back in Burlington, 4hrs total outage.
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Don't Feed the Trolls----Click 'Hey mods' instead!:) |
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| reply to exocet_cm
Yeah, then there are all those illegal FRS relay nets - lmbo. |
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 Hayward K A R - 1 2 0 CPremium
join:2000-07-13
Key West, FL
kudos:1 | reply to David95037
said by David95037:
With power out in many areas our fragile communications infrastructure is brought to its knees.
What a load of crap... the phone system has both battery and generator back up.
Yes cell phones may be down because of increased traffic or that they are not yet required to have power back up.
Of course then again probably 80% of people these days have cordless or otherwise powered phones so they THINK the phones are out when in fact if the still had a good old basic line powered phone all would be just fine.
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»haywardm.com (Hayward's Key West) |
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 beerbumobscurum per obscuriusPremium
join:2000-05-06
Eastern PA | reply to David95037
notice how telephone service was effected.. mainly cellular but some regular land-line service also.. but.. isn't it nice to know that a major region of the country is hit with a major power outage that there was hardly a hiccup with Internet service..
granted those residences without power would be without Internet.. I'm talking major backbones and ISP's.
Just as the 'net was designed to do, it routed around the damage..
interesting that the recent worm had a greater impact on the Internet than a large regional power outage. |
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| reply to Hayward
said by Hayward:
said by David95037:
With power out in many areas our fragile communications infrastructure is brought to its knees.
What a load of crap... the phone system has both battery and generator back up.
Yes cell phones may be down because of increased traffic or that they are not yet required to have power back up.
Of course then again probably 80% of people these days have cordless or otherwise powered phones so they THINK the phones are out when in fact if the still had a good old basic line powered phone all would be just fine.
My ISP was up the whole power outage, yet I wasint able to access anything off network (for a few hours until T.O was backup).. Goes to show the internet failed its first big test. I thought when a few peers go offline and everything is down traffic was supposed to be re-routed... Goes to show the internet is centralized and useless for its original purpose of creation.. (not like I cared just something I felt like pointing out.):p
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Dont copy that floppy! |
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| said by lazarus_:
My ISP was up the whole power outage, yet I wasint able to access anything off network (for a few hours until T.O was backup).. Goes to show the internet failed its first big test. I thought when a few peers go offline and everything is down traffic was supposed to be re-routed... Goes to show the internet is centralized and useless for its original purpose of creation.. (not like I cared just something I felt like pointing out.):p
The internet IS fault tolerant, remember the slammer worm? It dropped 7 of the 13 main dns servers and nobody noticed. |
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Hayward K A R - 1 2 0 CPremium
join:2000-07-13
Key West, FL
kudos:1 | reply to lazarus_
said by lazarus_:
My ISP was up the whole power outage, yet I wasint able to access anything off network Goes to show the internet failed its first big test. I thought when a few peers go offline and everything is down traffic was supposed to be re-routed... Goes to show the internet is centralized and useless for its original purpose of creation.
So you are basing the entire internet on your single ISP? Interesting.
What the internet has become, has ZERO to do with what it was designed to be, which was SOLELY a way for university research facilities to communicate with each other as a CLOSED system.
Frankly that the net functions at all given the model it was designed on is rather remarkable.
It was never designed to be what it has become.
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»haywardm.com (Hayward's Key West) |
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beerbumobscurum per obscuriusPremium
join:2000-05-06
Eastern PA | said by Hayward:
So you are basing the entire internet on your single ISP? Interesting.
nothing interesting about it.. people have been doing that since ISP's started popping up in 1994-1995.
In a way they are correct.. if their local ISP is down, for all intents and purposes to those people the Internet IS down.
As far as the rest of this global network of networks known as the Internet, this event was hardly a blip on the radar. |
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| reply to Hayward
said by Hayward:
said by lazarus_:
My ISP was up the whole power outage, yet I wasint able to access anything off network Goes to show the internet failed its first big test. I thought when a few peers go offline and everything is down traffic was supposed to be re-routed... Goes to show the internet is centralized and useless for its original purpose of creation.
So you are basing the entire internet on your single ISP? Interesting.
What the internet has become, has ZERO to do with what it was designed to be, which was SOLELY a way for university research facilities to communicate with each other as a CLOSED system.
Frankly that the net functions at all given the model it was designed on is rather remarkable.
It was never designed to be what it has become.
No.. I'm basing it on that all most the peering companies for southern Ontario are bassed in the GTA, so when they went down my ISP's connection to the internet also went down...
It might have started with Universities (Umm most universities invent and inovate these types of technologies) But military actually developed the internet to de-centeralize so that if one area went down everything wouldin't go down and they would still have a network going.
Basically what happened was T.O went down and we were cut off since there are no other peering companied outside T.O. Hence Centralized...
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Dont copy that floppy!
[text was edited by author 2003-08-15 13:45:29] |
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| Your blow blowing things out of proportion. This topic is saying Fragile communications infrastructure
I'm saying my experience and confirming how it is very fragile. The only reason it is so Fragile is because blackouts like these happen every 40 Years (so far) so why would a ISP spend all this extra $$ peparing for a blackout when there is no need.. Its not like the few people that have power will need the internet, and its not like the ISP would waste all that extra $$$ to provide iNet to them..
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Dont copy that floppy! |
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| I sure hope ISPs do not have that attitude since the internet was a good source for me of instant information to what was going on in the early hours of the power failure.
TV was useless since there was no RF signal from Cablevision, about half the radio stations were off the air without power or were still playing music with a couple providing some details of what was going on.
My systems however were on UPS including my Cloud 9 DSL connection which remained online for about an hour into the power failure. It was nice having the ability to instantly
check in for updates on the net rather than having to wait listening for updates on the radio.
[text was edited by author 2003-08-15 20:02:17] |
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