CenturyLink Down, Not Working? Nationwide Outages Reported By Users

 

CenturyLink Down, Not Working? Nationwide Outages Reported By Users

When the Internet was created in the 1960s by the U.S. Defense Department's Advanced Research Project Agency, it was designed to be "self healing." That means if one part of the network is taken out (in DARPA's scenario, a nuclear strike on one or more American cities), the network routes around the damaged areas and keeps functioning as a "network of networks."

As legacy telephone and cable companies became Internet Service Providers using the Internet protocol technology to deliver voice, video and data telecommunications, the survivability and redundancy built into the Internet has weakened. Too much of their network operations functions are centralized, rendering their entire national networks vulnerable to a single hardware or software glitch as shown by today's most recent outage taking down much of CenturyLink's network.

The lesson here for policymakers and regulators is the United States needs to ensure the advanced telecommunications services the Internet transports must be designed and managed to build on the original resilient design of the Internet. That could mean reducing the role of private sector, investor owned players like CenturyLink that are naturally inclined to limit network operational capabilities in order to avoid the expense of managing multiple and redundant network assets.

While technically more complex, given their vital role advanced telecommunications should be as solid and reliable as basic analog voice telephone service that preceded it.

Robert W. Taylor, a pioneer of the modern computer, dies at 85 - LA Times

Robert W. Taylor, a pioneer of the modern computer, dies at 85 - LA Times: Robert W. Taylor, one of the most important figures in the creation of the modern computer and the Internet, has died. He was 85. According to his son Kurt Taylor, the scientist died Thursday at his home in Woodside. He suffered from Parkinson’s disease and other ailments. Taylor’s name was not known to the public, but it was a byword in computer science and networking, where he was a key innovator who transformed the world of technology. Taylor was a Pentagon researcher in the 1960s when he launched Arpanet, which evolved into what we know today as the Internet.

Presaging the concern in our current time over disparate access to advanced Internet-based telecommunications, Taylor wrote the following in a paper he co-authored, The Computer as a Communication Device published in April 1968 in Science and Society:

For the society, the impact will be good or bad, depending mainly on the question: Will "to be on line" be a privilege or a right? If only a favored segment of the population gets a chance to enjoy the advantage of "intelligence amplification," the network may exaggerate the discontinuity in the spectrum of intellectual opportunity.

NYT op-ed complaining of low Internet subscribership undermines author's credibility

No Country for Slow Broadband - NYTimes.com: The major causes for low subscribership, as extensive survey research shows, are low interest in the Internet and minimal digital literacy. And too many American households lack the money or interest to buy a computer. As a result, more Americans subscribe to cable TV and cellphones than to Internet service. Our broadband subscription rate is 70 percent, but could easily surpass 90 percent if computer ownership and digital literacy were widespread.

So argues Richard Bennett, senior fellow at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.  There is a big hole in this argument.  Information and communications services are universally verging toward employing Internet Protocol (IP) to deliver them.  People are increasingly viewing video content delivered over the Internet to making voice calls using Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP). 

In segmenting discrete services and citing just one type of Internet-enabled service (personal computing), one has to question why someone with Bennett's level of knowledge would even make this point, undermining his credibility and suggesting a hidden agenda.

Holy disruption, Batman! Tech upstarts threaten TV broadcast model | Reuters

Tech upstarts threaten TV broadcast model | Reuters

Around the time television began to reach most U.S. homes in the 1940s and 1950s, cable TV came into being with CATV (Community Antenna Television), using a single large antenna to pull in and pipe weak, distant TV signals via cable into communities at the fuzzy, snowy edges of metro area TV broadcast signals.

Now just as it has distributed broadcast radio from all over the globe for the past decade and longer, the Internet is becoming a global CATV of sorts, capturing broadcast signals over thousands of antennas, according to this Reuters dispatch.  

This poses a major disruptive threat to the business models of paid cable TV and satellite featuring packages of hundreds of channels. Not to mention over the air TV broadcasters that have invested large sums to upgrade to digital TV broadcast equipment and transmitters with the end of analog TV broadcasts.

As the late mass communications theorist Marshall McLuhan wrote of television in its 1964 heyday, "The medium is the message." Now that medium is no longer TV.  It's the Internet.

Robust fiber to the premise telecom infrastructure can help stem falling rural school enrollment

The Sacramento Bee reports today on rapidly falling enrollment in rural school districts in the Sacramento, California metro region.  I personally think we need help," Fred Adam, superintendent of Placer Hills Union and an executive committee member with the state’s Small School Districts' Association, told newspaper, adding, "I truly worry about the future.”

Behind the drop in enrollment, according to the Bee article, are an aging population and a declining birth rate. In rural areas, the article continues, these trends are magnified by a small employment base that has been further eroded by years of recession. With few jobs and fewer options, many families have moved to the suburbs or out of state to find work. "It's a pretty consistent story throughout California in rural communities," Adam is quoted as saying. "You can't compete with time and distance."

Yes we can.  It can be bridged by robust, Internet-based telecommunications services that can enable rural school districts to rely less on classrooms and the need to bus students to and from them, thereby reducing operating expenses.

How?  By facilitating what educators are calling blended learning.  Jeremy Meyers, deputy superintendent of the El Dorado County Office of Education (quoted in the Sacramento Bee story), recently wrote about the emerging educational method in which pupils do much of their learning and class projects outside of the classroom via the Internet – arguably the world’s biggest and best stocked library.  Back in the classroom, their teachers review their projects, answer questions and lead discussions. Authors William A. Draves and Julie Coates describe Web-based education as one of the nine defining trends of the 21^st century in the 2004 book Nine Shift: Work, Life, and Education in the 21^st Century.
 
Just as workshifting allows their parents to work part of the work week at the office, might someday soon students report to class on fewer days that the Industrial Age Monday through Friday schedule of the 20^th Century?  This is not to say the classroom is facing obsolescence, particularly for primary students where the classroom plays an important role in the development of social skills.  But for older kids who grew up in the connected world, blended learning makes lots of sense.

Key to making this possible is fiber to the premise telecommunications infrastructure that has the capacity to deliver information in all forms as well as enable video conferencing between students, parents and educators.  In order for that critical infrastructure to be put in place, communities must come together and find ways to finance its planning, construction and operation since the business models of existing telephone and cable companies cannot accommodate the telecommunications needs of less populous areas. 
 
A virtuous bonus of more robust telecommunications infrastructure is it would also better enable parents of school age children to work remotely and run home-based businesses.  That in turn would help keep them and their kids in the community and curb declining school enrollment.

Europe Hurting Telecom Industry: Alcatel-Lucent CEO

Europe Hurting Telecom Industry: Alcatel-Lucent CEO: European regulations are stifling innovation within the telecom industry and preventing its growth, Ben Verwaayen, CEO of Paris-based telecom equipment maker Alcatel-Lucent has told CNBC.

"It's not just a French problem it's a European problem. If you look to why it is that the U.S. is so much [more] ahead than Europe it's because of the business environment and what you're allowed to do because this is a regulated business. The situation in Europe is very unfortunate," Verwaayen said in an interview telecast on Thursday.

U.S. ahead of Europe?  With about 20 million Americans lacking facilities-based Internet service?  Clarification, please.

Despite growth of Internet telecommunications, majority of employers don't allow telework

We may be living in the era of Internet telecommunications where most any generation, analysis and manipulation of words and numbers can be done from most anywhere having adequate telecom infrastructure.

But for most American businesses, that fact hasn't yet fully registered. Most still believe this type of work can only be done in office buildings and cubicles, which in turn reinforces that time sucking activity known as commuting. At a time when people are strapped for time and want to reduce their carbon footprints. And exercise more and perhaps lower their employers' soaring health care costs in the process.

The results of a random telephone survey of nearly 10,000 businesses in a dozen states last year found only 23 percent allow telework. The results are reported in a white paper issued today by Connected Nation, Leveraging Technology to Stimulate Economic Growth.

The post-broadband era begins

As 2010 draws to a close, we are also seeing the closure of a chapter of the early Internet era and the beginning of a new one. The first chapter opened in the early 1990s when the few people who connected to the Internet did so with narrowband "dial up" connections using the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). By the end of that decade, dialup evolved from 1200 and 2400 baud connections to 56Kbs connections as well as ISDN offering Internet connections of up to 128Kbs. At the same time, "broadband" began emerging with DSL and Internet services offered by cable companies.

We are now beginning a new chapter where throughput speeds that defined an Internet connection will be less relevant than the services and applications people use when they access the Internet. If the connection can't support them, it no longer will be considered bona fide Internet-based service. From a practical standpoint, that means dialup and satellite connections are now obsolete since they cannot provide end users a full Internet experience due to the inherent physical limitations of their technologies.

Also being rendered obsolete as bandwidth demand grows exponentially, particularly with the explosion of video content and mobile Internet:

-- The U.S. Federal Communications Commission's definition of a "broadband" Internet connection as 4Mbs down and 1Mbs up.

-- The term "broadband black hole" and dubious efforts to "map" these locations. These areas will simply be regarded as disconnected from the Internet, similar to the "off the grid" term applied to those locations lacking electric power service.