Tuesday, April 14, 2009
In San Jose, California last week thousands of businesses lost connectivity for nearly 10 hours when vandals reportedly climbed through a manhole and cut fiber-optic cables. Fixing the problem had to start with finding the problem. Then, fixing fiber-optics isn't like splicing a 10-gauge wire with a stripper and some black tape. All this leaves me wondering, should your broadband be hanging by a fiber?

According to CNET, among the businesses affected was everyone from email marketing firms with millions of emails to serve all the way to small retail, convenience stores, and private homes. The outage affected people in at least 3 nearby cities.

How many cell towers can be found in that same radius? Not less than a dozen. It would take a small army of vandals to black out the redundancy of that GSM wireless grid. Fixed wireless broadband, whether as a primary network or a backup network, could have kept tens of thousands of businesses online. If each business does just 10 transactions an hour of $10 a piece, that would be no less than $1 Million in sales processed without a hitch.

Now, imagine if your store wasn't located in a grid like urban San Francisco. How long could it take to restore connectivity to your new store in a developing community or the gas station off a rural highway. When just one over-zealous digger severs a cable or a vandal finds an unguarded manhole, what can that mean for your expanding business? Will you be ready? Will you stay connected?

Labels: backup network, Broadband, Fixed Wireless Broadband

posted by Unknown at 4:57 AM Link to this Article

Comments:

There isn't much redundancy built into the telco networks - as this outage demonstrates. But the fiber is also used to backhaul the cell towers and in many cases the fixed wireless too.
posted by  Peter Radizeski : May 26, 2009 at 6:45 AM