Net Buzz with Richard Wiggins | 19

Galaxy 4 Fails; the Internet to the Rescue

I asked if the programming feed was real-time or asynchronous:

The Internet saved the day when a single point of failure – one communications satellite – failed. But what would be the implication of a statewide Internet outage? Such a catastrophe is highly unlikely, as there are many components that make up the fabric of regional Internet links. Still, such regional outages are not unheard of.

So how viable is the Internet as a replacement for other communications media? After all, the Internet doesn't exist as a separate physical network. For the most part, it's a network of networks built upon the global telephone network.

The Internet was designed to be robust; after all, the U.S. Defense Department funded research into the creation of the Internet Protocol. Internet routers are smart enough to find alternate paths when communications links go down. But the ability to route to an alternate path depends on the existence of such an alternative. A major outage of a long distance carrier can take huge chunks of the Internet down – unless the ISPs involved have built in redundancy.

Moreover, today's Internet can't offer guaranteed quality of service. The NPR stations that recovered from Galaxy 4's death by streaming a feed over the Net were dependent on good luck for congestion to be light. You wouldn't use today's Internet for a daily real time feed – except when an emergency forces you to do so. Someday, when Internet bandwidth reservations schemes are implemented, you might use the Internet for real-time delivery of content to large audiences.

Our dependence on technology is best revealed in the worst situations – when an important technology fails us. Before Galaxy 4 died, probably only a couple hundred people in the United States realized that virtually every pager in the country depended on a single satellite to deliver vital pages. After the outage, many millions of users knew about that single point of failure. Some doctors slept in hospitals rather than miss pages concerning critically ill patients.

As Matt Ferguson explains, the Internet can provide many advantages, but users have to evaluate risks of moving from dedicated communications to Internet communications. Fortune 500 companies are beginning to rely on the Internet for IP telephony and for virtual private networks. Enlightened customers work with their ISPs to try to eliminate single points of failure. Despite the best efforts of ISPs and their customers, no doubt we'll learn about many other single points of failure – involving traditional communications paths, or Internet links, or both – only after something important to our lives falls silent.