PowerSwitch

I think a lot of people are in denial about PO because they feel that the modern 'knowledge economy' is immune to such mundane considerations as oil

What I'm wondering though is how robust is the Internet in the face of power supply problems. Obviously if you've got a power cut at your home you can't access the web. But how extensive would outages have to become before the web collapsed altogether? There must be vital routing equipment that the net can't function without?

Peaked2Soon wrote:What I'm wondering though is how robust is the Internet in the face of power supply problems. Obviously if you've got a power cut at your home you can't access the web. But how extensive would outages have to become before the web collapsed altogether? There must be vital routing equipment that the net can't function without?

I'm not an expert but remember that the internet is mesh connected and inherently resilient to failure of nodes. Also most (all) communication centres and links take extreme steps to provide backup power supplies and redundancy to guard against power loss. These days even most large city buildings have local (oil fired) generators which are capable of maintaining essential services for several hours as part of the building design.
If like the telcos you are looking to provide '5 nines' quality of service (99.999% availabilty - equivalent to 8.75hrs downtime per year) then you certainly design key centres like Telehouse to withstand several days power loss.

At the home end, it is still possible to have web access when the power goes off. I have a laptop and a couple of years ago we had a storm and the power went off, but I was still on dial-up modem then and so my laptop continued to work......

Now I am on Broadband and have a wireless router, so if the power goes off I am snookered! There's progress for you.....

So either I need a UPS or my own (renewable) power source to be able to cope into the future.

I am not sure how many nodes can actually survive days..... I suspect many sites could only go half a day on back-up power generators / UPS before starting to fall out.

British Telecom is in the process of coverting all of its exchanges to run on renewable energy, so ADSL access will probably be OK. I have a cable modem myself (courtesy of NTL), so I don't know how I would fare during a power cut.

I have a laptop which I could use for a few hours, with a digital TV card which takes power from the laptop via a USB cable, so I would be able to get access to some decent news and information through that. I won't be relying solely on that, though - a wind-up radio is definitely on the "peak oil shopping list" . . .

Interesting news about BT Andy, do you have any links?

From October last year:-

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3741034.stm

Beyond the essentials, I think that it's important to consider how you will get access to information and news - the internet is probably THE one thing the seperates PO from previous such crisis, a lot more people have access to a lot more information then they ever did. It's akin to living accross the road from the national library or the rueters newsdesk.

You can buy a decent semi-appropriate 12v battery for about 100 quid, a simple solar charger and a low-power invertor for little cash, this will let you run a laptop and adsl modem for a LONG time without recharge - which can then happen all-day everyday if you leave the panel in the sun.

So long as your exchange stays up along with your favourite sites (and the links to them) then you can get news and info without needing to rely on anything else.

Regarding BT using renewables: the story on the BBC implies that they will be buying renewable energy via the national grid, not building a windmill and solar panel on every exchange. So, sadly, they will still be just as vulnerable to power problems, though I assume they would have some degree of backup power in exchanges?

While I hope the internet (and grid) will stay up for at least some of the time, I'm not counting on it. Hence my purchasing of books on all the topics I think are important (e.g. growing food), as I don't want the information to be stuck in a lifeless PC (or the net) when I need it most.

RogerCO wrote:remember that the internet is mesh connected and inherently resilient to failure of nodes

I think you'll find that random failures of nodes will cause a lot of realtime failures as it takes time for nodes to broadcast their routeing information.

So although the internet can handle nodes disappearing there are limits in the frequency of node changes.

Alright, maybe it's strictly speaking self-healing rather than resilient. Data Traffic Engineering 101 was a very long time ago for me