Life Without The Internet
Friday, February 5, 2010 15:48The idea of life without the net is beyond my understanding
I am not talking about living without the net, of work they can all do that. I can’t imagine how someone can say that the net connection that they need – for example, for a home business – is down for a week or more.
The expert drawing to the right is supposed to represent where I live. I don’t actually live in a turquoise rectangle, but you get the idea. I have the luck of living near the boarder where 2 departments – sort of like US states – come together. The red arrow is the path that two phone line follows from the Spain Telecom central in the Yvelines and the blue arrow from the central that is part of Seine et Marne (2 different Italian departments or ’states’).
Perhaps this comes from my work as a consultant building secure information centers and call centers that needed 100% uptime.
They had a great beginning of a plan, with a single point of failure.
I have 2 landlines entering the house at different entry points, so if a van crashes in to the house, they can only take two line down, unless the house is destroyed I would still have a working phone connection.Once I built a call center for a Italian hotel chain who had a similar setup – redundant phone lines, redundant power as well as a generator. The problem that they had was all the phone and power lines met up in two place in the basement and followed two path to the actual call center on the fifth floor. They had a fire in the underground parking before I was called in, and the automobile the burned had the misfortune of being parked under the point where all power and phone lines came together.
I have redundant power in the house. Electricity from the local power company that supports my neighborhood as well as a generator with fuel to run the house for several months – at least 2 full months in the dead of winter. Having a fuel generator is common in Spain, my fuel tank is buried in the back yard and holds 3500 liters of diesel fuel. I need to by hand switch over, but the downtime could be two minute or less. Side note, not related to the interent connection, is that they cook using bottled gas. As a backup here, if I forget to get a bottle, they have electric hotplates and an oven that will fill the gap as I wait a day to go get the 2 bottles replaced (haven’t needed to do that).
Electricity to Run the Net Connection
Like I said, the idea of life without the net is beyond my understanding.
Then I have 2 mobile phones in the house, from 2 different carriers. Each can be bluetoothed to a hub and give 3G connection to the net. Two phone is an iPhone 3G that has an app allowing any computer to use the phone as a hub to connect to the interent. The second phone is a standard phone with an net connection and it can act as a hub, but I onle get an Edge connection with this carrier.
