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.

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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.

Last week, Toronto Hydro Telecom announced that it has selected Siemens to power its city-wide WiFi project.

Want to see a preview of the network in operation? Register now for The 2006 Canadian Telecom Summit, June 12-14, 2006 where Toronto Hydro Telecom will be powering the onsite WiFi services being provided to all delegates.

I’ll be leading a module tomorrow morning at the Executive Development Program which is run by University of Toronto’s Master of Engineering in Telecom program. I have to say that I enjoy being on campus through the year to deliver the couple lectures to the Master’s program and it is also a rush to be in front of 60 high energy, high potential management employees of the carriers, manufacturers and government.

Hopefully, we’ll get some good discussion going – for me, it’s warm-up time for the big show in 4 weeks, the launch of The 2006 Canadian Telecom Summit.

While we can argue about whether the Commander-in-Chief (you know, the guy who is empowered to overturn verdicts and pardon death-row criminals) is allowed to authorize access to your phone records, hopefully there is no disagreement over whether the police can simply use web search engines to help find criminal behaviour.

I’m talking run-of-the-mill web-surfing. That’s what Maryland fire inspectors did to crack a case of 17 fires over the past 4 months.

And today’s winners of the coveted ‘what-the-heck-was-I-thinking’ award are the two teenaged arsonists who bragged about their exploits, complete with photos, to their friends on MySpace.com.

I’m waiting for their lawyer to file suit for unreasonable search. After all, it’s called MySpace, not OurSpace.

Safety tip, kids: the internet is a pretty wide open public space. When bragging about arson, shop-lifting or whatever helps pick up dates these days, you may want to try some other approach.

The freedom to associate with who ever you want to is a pretty fundamental civil right. In Canada, that freedom is found in Section 2d of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In the US, the right is established by the first amendment.

By no means am I a constitution expert.

I like to ensure that people examine issues from both sides now, from win and lose, from up and down and still somehow… sorry, that was another Canadian.

A hot news story is how the US National Security Agency has been looking at people’s phone records. Some are arguing that this constitutes unreasonable search and seizure. People are up in arms. I find it fascinating that people don’t mind their phone company having this information, or that someone working in a call centre half-way around the world can look at your calling patterns. But, not the people who take an oath of office to defend and protect you.

Have we seen too many movies?

Let me just note that both the Canadian Charter and US Fourth Amendment use the modifier ‘unreasonable’ in front of ‘search and seizure’. Both countries modify the freedom of assembly with the adjective ‘peaceful’. So, neither right is absolute. Both sides now.

These are different times. When we read that the UK had identified the transit bombers in advance but did not act because of resources, one wonders if people would have preferred that there had been no surveillance at all.

Why am I weighing in on this? It appears to me to have telecom policy issues associated with it although clearly this is an area better kept for real lawyers – not those of us trained for the NY criminal bar by distance learning – otherwise known as watching Law & Order.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll state that my politics on this subject are likely skewed in part by having one of my kids attending school in a part of the world that sees more than its fair share of terrorism. Is any amount fair?