DirecTV Strikes Out
Yesterday morning, many die-hard baseball fans got up extra early to watch the Red Sox/Athletics season opener in Japan, only to be given an even ruder awakening than the sound of their alarm clocks - a blank TV screen when they tried to watch the game. DirecTV (and some Comcast) customers missed most or all of the game because of what the company said was a “transponder issue,” and the web was abuzz with complaints from sleepy-eyed fans.
After reading some blog posts and story responses from angry customers, I couldn’t help but think ahead to the 2010 soccer World Cup in South Africa. Last month, the country announced its intentions to begin work on a submarine fiber-optic cable linking itself to Europe, fueled partly by the desire to provide enough capacity to broadcast the games from Africa to the rest of the world. Seeing the frustrations created by an outage only affecting two teams’ fans, I’d hate to think what would happen if this undersea cable met the same fate as its Middle East counterpart, and the entire world’s soccer fans were deprived of watching their biggest event.
As this type of damage is common, we can only hope that those in charge of designing the S. African network learned from the Middle East’s very public and costly mistake, and are planning to build in strong redundancy and disaster avoidance capabilities.
