aridhol's Journal: Redundancy

A little after 10 last night, all two-way communications in St. John's, NL went down. We still had radio and TV, but we didn't have telephones or internet. This includes such trivialities as 911 emergency calls.

The cause of failure? A single wire.

A single wire in an Aliant substation shut down all communications in this city, whether through Aliant, Rogers, Telus, or anyone else.

What ever happened to redundant connections? Aren't routers supposed to skip over that? You'd think a city would have more than one route for their communications. Instead, a single wire killed service for 150,000 people.

Time to fix? 5 hours. That can be a long time to go without an emergency call if one was needed.