(2009-04-10) Santa Clara Fiber Sabotage

Santa Clara Country was hit with sabotage of its Fiber Optic Infrastructure. The outage initially affected some Cell Phone-s, Internet access and about 52,200 Verizon household land lines in Morgan Hill, Gilroy and Santa Cruz County, according to the Santa Clara County Office of Emergency Services. The cell phone networks affected are Verizon, Nextel, Sprint and some ATT. 911 service was affected, too. ATT's contract with the Communication Workers of America expired at 11:59 p.m. Saturday, but Britton said "we have a really good relationship with the union" and that negotiations continue between the two sides.

John Robb hits the lack of Resilience with all this Infrastructure.

Bruce Perens [notes](http://perens.com/works/articles/Morgan Hill/) the Security risks of centralized technology (SaaS, network configuration errors, etc.). Cellular towers can not, in general, connect phone calls on their own, even if both phones are near the same tower. They communicate with a central switching computer to operate, and when that system doesn't respond, they're useless... Many such networks depend on outside services to match host names to network addresses (DNS), and thus stop operating the moment they are disconnected from the internet. Even when the internal network stays up, email is often hosted on some outside service, and thus becomes unavailable. Programs that depend on an internet connection for license verification will fail, and this feature is often found in server software. Commercial VoIP telephone systems will stay up for internal use if properly engineered to be independent of outside resources, but consumer VoIP equipment will fail. .. Communications will be a problem during any emergency (Disaster Response). Two-way radios have, to a great extent, been replaced by cellular "walkie-talkie" services that can not be relied upon to work during an Infrastructure failure. Real two-way radios, stand-alone pager systems, and radio repeaters that enable regional communications are still available to the governments and businesses that endure the expense of planning, acquiring, maintaining, and testing them. Corporate disaster planners should look into such facilities. Municipalities, regardless of their size, should not consider abandoning such resources in favor of the less-robust cellular services. I think it would be more productive to list how to get IP-based systems selected and configured to minimize these risks. (Hmm, I wonder whether VoIP-over-3G would work from that same cell tower?)