Network Diversity Groaning Under Services Pressure

On Tuesday night this week while I was preparing for the VPIsystems sales conference, a massive undersea network cable was cut and Internet access was crippled across much of Egypt and India (a trade group estimates about 60 percent of India’s Internet users were affected). I was especially interested to read about the disruption, because I worked on this particular ring network years ago. It certainly made for some interesting discussion with my colleagues over lunch yesterday.

Most carriers have a plan to avoid outages like this, in the form of network diversity and back-ups. This network was no exception. So why did such a simple outage result in massive network failure across the Middle East? No one can (or likely will) say for sure but, as the above NYT story alludes to, I suspect both legs of the ring in the network were fully loaded, due to a combination of increasing demand for high-bandwidth services and the high cost of deploying/maintaining underwater networks.

Hopefully this incident will serve as a wake-up call to carriers everywhere on the importance of network diversity and disaster planning, and they’ll all take a hard look at their infrastructure to prevent an outage of this scale from happening to them (and us!). In the “always on” world carriers and the businesses they serve live in, network downtime is not an option.

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