Yeah, Firstly, Internet has been developed to overcome problems on nuclear war threat (in the first place). The idea behind is to create a robust system that will survive eventhough nuclear war happen in the whole world. But recently, the major earthquake in Taiwan couple of day makes the worst in Internet connectivity as the undersea cable has been tear off in Hongkong and Taiwan. This disaster should not takes the Internet downed if the are substantial effort to create a pure robust network to become a backbone of Internet connectivity. Why should this happen as the main idea of Internet is to be a very robust system? What is your comment?
Well, the thing about natural disasters is, that there's no way to predict when and where they're gonna happen. So, I don't think we can do this, nature will always have something we're not prepared for.
Why don't we maximised the usage of Multiple Ad-Hock Network (MANET) or WiMAX and boost it via satellite link. It much more adaptable and easy to managed and disaster free? We can try to make an alternative solution to do it better. right?
When it comes to human technology there will always be flaws in design and functionality. The chaos of nature always has the chance to exploit these flaws in such a way that causes the technology to be unusable or damaged. Like your example of the underwater cable breaking due to the earthquake. Even your satellite linking could be potentially flawed; if for instance it gets hit by a piece of space debris. In short there is no way to make a perfect internet, and nature will always do what humans least expect.
When a system is built & implemented it is designed to a specification & standard, but as we have found out for the last 5 days that is no guarantee for sustained connectivity when a natural event occcurs like the earthquake My business has been virtually halted all this time since the earthquake in Taiwan and the best I can work to is 1 browser screen that keeps cutting out Perfection or indeed 365/24/7 Internet is a dream. not a reality
Yeah... it's a dream that we should try to make it happen. Meanwhile as many business being halted during this earthquake, some continent can accessed the internet at normal speed. The internet should be auto redirecting due to the system implementation. New network provider should create a redundant link to support future disaster.
Anyway, Internet is not as stable as traditional phone system. I think we need more cables with more capacity, and those cables could backup each other.
Capacity is one thing, but the real issue is redundancy and contigency plan. If we have a good satellite link plus a total WiMAX and MANET topology, the disaster could not take off our communication. Undersea Cable + Satellite + Microwave + WiMAX and MANET = Probably the best network world can have. That's what I think.
Once the Internet becomes more wireless, earthquakes should no longer be an issue. Until then, everything available on the ground or in the ocean is fair game.