Internet outages during summer blackout greater than originally believed

The Internet worked fairly well during last summer’s blackout in Ontario and the American northeast but connectivity was more seriously affected than initially thought, according to a report from Renesys Corp. of Hanover NH. Authors of the Impact of the 2003 Blackouts on Internet Communications report conclude that greater investment is needed in the Internet before it can be considered a replacement for traditional telephone infrastructure."The scale and duration of the outages we measured during the blackout strongly suggest that without additional investment in higher-quality interconnection and power at its edges, the Internet will be in no shape to supersede the telephone networks as the nation’s primary communications infrastructure," the authors write. "Reports that the Internet was generally unaffected by the August blackout significantly understated the event’s impact on the nation’s emergent critical communications infrastructure," reads the report. "The very largest provider networks (the Internet backbones) were reportedly unaffected by the blackout, but thousands of corporate and other institutional networks and millions of individual Internet users were offline for hours or days. Banks, investment funds, business services, manufacturers, hospitals, internet service providers, and federal and state government units were among the affected organizations." The study’s five authors go on to state that the specific effects of the blackout on Internet availability were well localized geographically. They found no evidence of failures having an effect on Internet stability worldwide. The report looks at the autonomous systems of network service providers with 50 or more customers in the blackout area. Seven of the 17 companies studied are Canadian. (The study had already found that service providers with fewer than 50 networks suffered the largest number of outages.) Renesys examined the estimated number of networks in the blackout area, the percent of network outages that lasted more than four hours, and the average duration of the outage. It looked only at DSL and similar connectivity, ignoring cable modems and dial-up. The most severely affected, according to the survey, was Allstream Corp. Nearly a third (32%) of its 115 networks experienced outages of more than four hours. The average outage duration was 84 hours. At the other extreme was Peterborough Utilities, which reported no outages of four hours or more among its 52 networks. Fellow utel Hamilton Hydro experienced outages lasting more than four hours in 27% of its 55 networks. The average outage was 16 hours. Bell Advanced Communications has the largest network grid of the Canadian companies studied. Some 11% of its 160 networks had outages lasting more than four hours, with an average outage of 17 hours. Sprint Canada experienced outages in 20% of its 66 networks, with the average lasting 30 hours. Telus Communications Inc. had 14% of its 64 networks suffer outages lasting more than four hours. Its average outage was 16 hours. UUNet’s average outage in Ontario was 13 hours. Of its 50 networks, 40% suffered outages of four hours or more.

Internet outages during summer blackout greater than originally believed

News | December 22, 2003

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