The last mile
Anybody else have problems with phones or Internet within the nineteen-communes today?
Around 4am this morning, Belgacom suffered a major outage that impinged upon everything in the Brussels area including phones, Internet connections, business data circuits, EFT networks, and even Belgacom's own mobile phone network, Proximus.
By mid-morning, Proximus, most land lines and EFT networks were available again, but related problems continued between networks such as Mobistar and BASE. A significant number of business services are still unavailable across Brussels, and should only be restored over the weekend.
Incredibly, we heard two official reasons for the outages, neither of them entirely satisfactory. One of them was that a major fibre-optic line had been damaged, and the other was that a major exchange had been flooded. Neither of them explain why services were not restored within a reasonable time, unless Belgacom are seriously negligent.
Despite having eight circuits with a variety of carriers for redundancy, we suffered an almost total loss of business today because of the last mile — the slice of a monopolising network's cabling that is required to connect you to the rest of the world. We pay ridiculous amounts of money for three-nines-uptime SLA's (about 9 hours downtime a year) but at the end of the day it can all come crashing down because of one single point of failure.
Fortunately with some creative networking and some cheap ADSL services we were able to continue functioning, albeit crippled without telephones or fax machines, and the support of satellite offices in other countries.
Does life move so fast these days that telecommunications is so vital? Days like today remind us how fragile technology can be.
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