At a dinner in London[1] four weeks ago I was asked to introduce myself and in the process mention one of the things that I have hope for, related to the Web[2]. Well it was too hard to think about hope, because I was overwhelmed by the little things I face every day that remind me of the fragility of this precious thing that we call the Internet.
- Every day some client or other says “my site is so slow, what’s wrong?”
- Outages (last week we had a router go down and a dozen sites were unavailable for 12 hours)
- Undersea cables
- Satellite communications subject to sunspot and other disruptions
- Routing snarls (YouTube and Pakistan)
- The sheer volume of indecent-to-pornographic spam
- The unreliability of email
- Spoofing and attacks against everyone
- Bandwidth challenges – you just can’t count on getting enough bandwidth when you’re on the road
- Hey, Sky, why doesn’t this program (MS Word, Excel, etc.) work? What key do I press to make this happen?
A friend, Greg Walton, reminded us a few years ago that the severing of just a few undersea cables would cause the Internet to grind to a halt. I’ll research those connections and put up a short article about it, but here’s a preview – a cable connecting the west coast of Africa has been damaged and has caused critical disruptions.
[1] During Traveling Geeks 2009.
[2] They said “the Web” but I always talk about the Internet as a whole because the World Wide Web is only a portion of the whole big transport medium. Otherwise you lose the impact of email (which is huge) and Twitter (SMS) and lots of other services that ride the Internet but are only peripherally involved with the Web.
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