Network reliability is a theme that keeps a lot of network managers up at night.
Some networks consciously ignore the issue, or seem to proudly announce scheduled service outages for 8-24 hours or more.1
Others, like Kentucky-based cable company Insight Communications, have problems associated with unexpected consequences of a network upgrade. It doesn’t matter who operates the network. Networks will occasionally fail. When everything is working, it’s hard to tell the service providers apart. Excellence shows up when there are problems. Superior companies are differentiated by how they respond to problems – or how they avoid problems altogether.
In a slightly related note – thanks to my roots in mathematics, I can find inspiration in tangents – I have been troubled by the deteriorating road conditions in my neighbourhood. For some reason, this has been a particularly bad spring for roads caving in. We had parts of one major street (Finch Avenue West) washed away in a downpour last summer and then the corner of Highway 7 and Jane decided to go for a swim at the beginning of February. Sheppard Avenue decided to join in the fun last month. These repairs are still slowly underway. Today, I noticed a cone in the middle of Centre Street which seems to indicate that last summer’s sewer repairs weren’t done properly and we will get to watch another street crumble.
There is a common thread here. Cities are having trouble keeping up with maintenance of the critical infrastructure that they are responsible for. None of these 4 streets are little neighbourhood roads. We’re talking major roads – 4-6 lanes with thousands of cars per day travelling on them. Millions of dollars of economic impact. Yet I don’t see maintenance crews working on weekends, working at night. In the case of the Finch Avenue repairs, it took three months before repair construction even started!
It is irrelevant that excuses will blame the lack of urgency on budget restrictions. What concerns me is that people think that telecommunications facilities belong in the hands of cities. That cities could then operate condominium fibre or wireless networks for the service providers – as a public utility. Fine in theory – but it falls apart in practice.
As I said above, networks will occasionally fail. I don’t want the same people who are in charge of planning, operating, maintaining and restoring my streets to be the folks fixing my network.
1 See my earlier posts about Xanga.com’s migration to a larger data centre and the CRTC’s scheduled outage due to a building power upgrade.