Re: [nznog] Labour alleges failure of Southern Cross Cable

Good article. Another related that Christchurch, and a couple of other earthquakes (Haiti, Japan) raised is just out critical the mobile networks are after such events. Arguably far more important than any other. Keeping the mobile networks up really needs to be front and center, forget about our stringent requirements for keeping a POTS service up to a collapsed building, we need stringent requirement for ensuring our mobile networks remain up. This maybe becomes more relevant if we're heading into a future with lot of UFB provided tails to mobile towers (i.e. all networks sharing the same common access). Regards Kris On 11/9/2012 5:09 PM, Paul Brislen wrote:

I wrote about exactly this issue (volcanoes and redundancy) this week:

http://tuanz.org.nz/blog/2012/11/8/critical-infrastructure

The two landing sites are within 15km of each other and while the risk of a volcanic eruption is low (actually it's unknown - we assume it's low) the damage from such an event would be devastating.

-----Original Message----- From: nznog-bounces(a)list.waikato.ac.nz [mailto:nznog-bounces(a)list.waikato.ac.nz] On Behalf Of Sam Silvester Sent: Friday, 9 November 2012 5:04 p.m. To: Kris Price Cc: nznog(a)list.waikato.ac.nz Subject: Re: [nznog] Labour alleges failure of Southern Cross Cable

On Fri, Nov 9, 2012 at 1:20 PM, Kris Price wrote:

...

Grandstanding, yes. But then again, isn't there actually a real problem here? With both spans of Southern Cross landing within a stones throw of each other (~30 kms), and on the northern side of a tiny little peninsula from the rest of the country, to boot. Isn't there any concern that a Christchurch like event in Auckland could damage both spans, knocking NZ offline for a couple of months while ships were tasked to repair them?

Without especially agreeing nor disagreeing with that - I suspect it's a case of not making perfection the enemy of the good.

True geographic diversity is expensive especially in terms of submarine cables. I'd contend (happy for somebody to jump in here if my instinct is wrong) is that whilst it's shitty when multiple cables get cut due to those kind of events, even having two cables on a similar path can be good because it's less likely one administrative group will take down the whole system.

I suspect the number of human error or hardware failures far exceed the number of earthquakes and the like.

Sam _______________________________________________ NZNOG mailing list NZNOG(a)list.waikato.ac.nz http://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/nznog