Internet Failure Hits Two Continents

In America, most places have a pretty redundant system now, so much so that “they” would have to take out at least two main switching stations to come close to taking out the internet for people. Some providers may have a connection outage, but all the traffic could be re-run. I don’t want to get to much more detail about that, because I do know that they get their information by spider-ing the internet as well as other sources, but suffice to say that most areas would be almost imposible to cripple the internet in America. This is not at all the truth everywhere.

In 1995 or 1996, I don’t remember which one, I was thinking about this as an attack scenario, as the Arpanet was disbursed originally to be still up and working in the case of nuclear attack. Even in the middle 90′s the internet (Arpanet became the internet) could still be effectively taken out at 6 sites. We have done a lot of telecommunications infrastructure expansion since then. Without getting specific, areas who’s infrastructure expansion was not at our level in the mid 90′s are generally still quite vulnerable, and even some that were could still probably be cut off from North America which would be crippling. I say probably because I don’t have data on important intercontinental infrastructure additions, but chances are that the same lines are being used with more duplexing since fiber can be used by so many different connections at once, and running an under-ocean cable is incredibly expensive especially compared to just putting another wavelength light on the line.