internet outages

[John van Oppen (list account)]

I happen to be in the "dark" portion of the city last week visiting my
parents...   I can't say that geeks don't think about emergency
preparedness (given that I am a hardcore geek), I had the fun time of
watching the emergency plan and equipment I put in for my parents go
into full effect:

They never lost internet access (two redundant DSL links to the ISP I am
a senior network person work for) combined with a generator meant all
they had to do was make sure they hade enough fuel and they were not
going offline.   It was pretty cool actually, they had neighbors coming
over to use the internet and phones as at least on Mercer Island, most
of the cellular coverage went away until the portable generators got
pulled out to the cell sites.

I think it might be worth pointing out, that assuming one is not using
cable internet, it is actually reasonably rare to loose internet access
in a storm or power outage.   The cable networks are _far_ more
venerable to both power outages and failure as a given node has to have
its own supply of power which can be put onto the coax for use by the
various amplifiers.   One major piece of down coax, run over by a car or
broken by a tree can short-out a whole node. 


John :)

-----Original Message-----
From: talk-bounces at seattlewireless.net
[mailto:talk-bounces at seattlewireless.net] On Behalf Of Todd Boyle
Sent: Friday, December 22, 2006 6:12 PM
To: talk at seattlewireless.net
Subject: internet outages

Hundreds of thousands of people emerge from the
storms with heightened awareness of internet, and
communications in general.

The amateur radio people have always captured the
public imagination with emergency communications.

Do you think any company who offered a self-configuring
wireless node with a UPS under it, might find some
customers now?  The physical node could be a utility box
on a mast with a marine car battery on the ground.
It could be marketed through community associations or
local government, or other ways of getting some critical mass
in a neighborhood.

Geeks tend to be either unaware or have undeveloped concepts
about these organizations.   Many of them have been doing
various degrees of emergency preparedness activities anyway.

And the node itself may be more salable to nontechnical
users if it comes with some minimal application interface
for the laptop, etc.

Of course the cellphone people kept their stuff online... but
a lot of people are not looking for "civil defense" police stuff.
We are looking for continuity in Internet access, and this
should be constructed as an edge network to enable
verizon/comcast users to share whatever connections
we have, with the dark areas of the city.

Todd

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