What Happens When Our Biggest Telco Goes Down?
It's a pretty important series of tube.
IMAGE BY Mike Lee, flickr.com/people/mikeleeorg/, Creative Commons
It's one of those things that is obviously plausible, but is equally written off as practically impossible in most people's minds. We jab and laugh at the likes of Vodafone for their own network woes, but when it comes to Telstra, we consider them to be the pricey, yet suitably solid, member of the pack. So what happens when their wholesale internet service goes completely down?
We here at PopSci AU run off a Bigpond connection, so everything - our phones, Telstra mobiles, and of course computers - all went down. With no internet, and the end of the world seemingly at hand, we had nothing better to do than spin around in our chairs, stare blankly into space, and otherwise be overcome with a sudden desire to rush out into Sydney's streets and proceed to burn things. Dramatic theme music being completely optional.
Thankfully, we had one or two non-Telstra devices on hand to gain net access with, and so stay the feeling of despair at being disconnected from Facebook, cute cat videos, and most importantly, the constant stream of scientific discoveries that we read through every day. Today, though, we promptly flicked over to Twitter to see the goings on regarding the Telstra downtime:
What was most interesting in all this was to see, in action, how reliant we are on telcos and our constant always-on internet access, to do things, to do our jobs, to actually 'get by' in day-to-day life. The problem is merely compounded when you're dealing with a telco as typically large and ever-present as Telstra. Their wholesale internet failure took with them the online services of three major Australian banks, Foxtel, a stack of other third party websites, email services, and no doubt a host of other places and services online that people use regularly during the day.
The problem isn't even just Telstra. Services like Google Calendar have gone down before. Even keeping in mind that many such cloud based sites are essentially free services, and even though companies like Google wisely distribute their services across servers to improve redundancy, any downtime, even if it affects only a tiny percentage of users, can be potentially catastrophic for a significant absolute number of users who make use of the internet as part of their livelihood.
So, even though it's worth remembering that Telstra is usually pretty good with this sort of thing, it's still cause for a moment of thought. Now excuse me, I have a whole hour's backlog of Tweets to read through.