Telecom Outage

A story this morning in the NZ Herald on the Telecom outage.

As usual, comments get abridged, so I’ll just elaborate a wee bit more here.

I made four main points:

1) Freak accidents do happen where you get two outages at the same time, so one should not be too judgemental.

2) However as Russell Brown has pointed out, greater use of neutral Internet peering exchanges would held mitigate the effects of such outages, as the better connectivity Telcos have, the more resistant one is to such accidents crippling the Internet.

3) Companies which critically need to stay connected, such as the NZ Stock Exchange, should have more than one Telco connection, so if events like earlier this week happen, they don’t close down. The .nz registry for example has connectivity through both major Telcos, and also have locations in both Auckland and Wellington, so that it should ne incredibly rare to ever have an outage that lasts hours instead of minutes

4) Both for reasons of stability, but also to cope with the exponentially growing demands, more money needs to be invested in Telco infrastructure.