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| Order of fallback systems, should the internet go down? |
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| Berni:
The internet can't just cease to exist in the blink of an eye. The whole thing called 'the internet' is not one singular thing. Its all a collection of telecommunication companies and institutions maintaining there own network that also connects to the network owned by others around them. All of them using routing algorithms to get the traffic trough on the optimal route. When a network link goes down the traffic is rerouted trough the next best route. These networks that combine together to form the internet use a wide range of networking equipment manufactured by companies around the world, so even if a deadly exploit is found it would not take down all of the networks, only some of them. The worst case is that so many links go down that these networks get cut off from each other. This can easily happen to small countries that might only have one or two links connecting it to the rest of the world. Yet even in that case the network can still talk inside itself. Any website hosted within that country would stay up, as the route to that IP is still available and the DNS server to locate the address is hosted by the local ISP (holding a cache of the global DNS records) The internet is constantly failing on a daily basis. From big mistakes like Facebook crashing there entire network by mistake, or small one from a contractor drilling trough a fiber cable in a wall, causing a few thousand IPs in some company building to be cut off, to medium ones of someone ripping a ISPs fiber line with en excavator. Sometimes a backup kicks in and nobody even notices, sometimes it results in a bunch of unhappy computer users for a few hours. Cell networks and POTS lines are mostly just another network connected into the same internet infrastructure. If the global situation gets so bad that all international internet links go down, then you will likely also have issues with access to mains power and running water. At that point the knowledge of how to use a radio is going to be less important than a lot of other survival skills. This could very well happen at some point, but i hope it won't be in my lifetime. |
| NiHaoMike:
I would expect satellite to be the most resilient to pretty much all natural disasters except solar storms. Haven't watched it yet but this should be a good explanation of how amateur radio operators prepare to operate during emergencies. |
| station240:
--- Quote from: eti on October 29, 2021, 04:45:25 am ---My reasoning brings me to system fallbacks in this order: #1 Entire internet goes down. #2 Entire POTS & GSM/cellular nets go down. #3 Ham radio cannot “go down” truly, as it’s a reflected, point to point system (afaik) using transmission and ionospheric reflection/skips to propagate the signals. --- End quote --- It's more likely #2 would fail first. There is an official US government document somewhere that states that if the current POTS/Cell/Cable networks were to totally fail, not to attempt to repair them. That is the existing equipment has enough obsolete junk as to not be worth rebuilding, that building a new network would make more sense. Rather dated, as predates things like the FiOS rollout, but I do agree with that concept. Anyway the internet has so much inbuilt redundancy, both in who owns/runs what, and redundant paths/equipment, it would take an act of god to kill it totally. |
| tooki:
--- Quote from: eti on October 29, 2021, 08:41:48 am --- --- Quote from: Ed.Kloonk on October 29, 2021, 08:32:31 am ---The internet will never totally 'go down'. I think the question you should be asking is: What services can I expect to access after the dung hits the proverbial? --- End quote --- I’m not sure anyone is truly able to guarantee that. Just because it hasn’t to date, that’s not to say it cannot. Networking is incredibly complex, whereas radio is incredibly simple and doesn’t require a bazillion TCP/IP layers, routers, switches et cetera - radio needs none of that nonsense, natural physics is inherently elegant in this respect. --- End quote --- The internet is literally the outcome of Cold War research into a network that could survive nuclear war. So while it’s true that (simple) radio is very resilient, so is the internet. What makes the internet resilient is that it is distributed. There’s no one control center. There’s no one managing entity. You could lop the internet in half, and each half would continue to be an internet, kinda like a tapeworm. :P The technical definition is that the internet is a network of networks. Each one is fundamentally self-contained except for its “connector” to other networks. I’d say that if there is a weak point in the modern internet, it’s DNS, because if DNS fails, you can’t find the servers you need, even if they’re still up and running. (This is exactly how Facebook self-immolated recently: it accidentally took down its own DNS, leaving them unable to reach their DNS servers to fix them, because they were themselves only accessible using DNS! :palm: So they had to physically go to the data centers and fix it right on the machines, which (rightfully) requires getting through many layers of physical security.) Remember also that what people think the internet is varies wildly: end users think it’s the web. But the web is just one service running on the internet. There are dozens of (often silently) user-facing services, and then a bunch of under-the-hood ones only system administrators ever deal with, and then some even deeper under-the-hood services only certain caliber of network admins ever interact with. In the end, shutting down the internet would be like saying “shutting down all land travel”. Yes, you could take out major highways. And yes, you could bomb a particular area to kingdom come, not even so much as leaving an existing foot path. But you’d never be able to knock out all land travel, because people can walk across fields. The internet is much the same. |
| madires:
--- Quote from: eti on October 29, 2021, 04:45:25 am ---#1 Entire internet goes down. #2 Entire POTS & GSM/cellular nets go down. --- End quote --- Those usually share the same fiber infrastructure. So all will fail when the underlying optical transport fails. Local POTS might survive for some time if your exchange office isn't "upgraded" to VoIP yet. If you're concerned about that you can get a ham radio license or an inexpensive CB radio. But I don't worry about a major telecommunication outage, because it would also come with a power outage which is more troublesome. |
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