The future of every business is, or will be, tied to the Internet in one way or another.
It's the best medium for nearly instant and universal communication that the world has ever known, and it's an essential means of connecting businesses to their suppliers, their customers and to the world at large.
But underneath this sweeping digital panorama is a dirty, little secret - the infrastructure that has become the backbone of e-commerce and a focal point for most businesses is unpredictable, unstable and, in some cases, unsustainable.
A two-month investigation by Sm@rt Partner shows the Internet is at risk from unexpected outages caused by everything from seismic disasters to system overloads, terrorism and just plain human error. Security is spotty, standards still don't exist in many arenas, and, because of the distributed ownership of the Internet itself, getting those standards in place is anything but easy.
"The Internet should be just like the telephone network," says Steve MacKay, chief system architect at Sun Microsystems. "But if you look at the architecture of the data center and the computing environment, [it's not developed to that point]. One of our big service provider customers has 30 to 40 percent of their gear down at any one time - they're either upgrading or doing maintenance, or something's crashed - and that's invisible to their e-mail and Web service. But they're the exception. Try having five or 10 friends send you emails at the same time - you won't get them at the same time, because some will inevitably pass through servers that are down and the servers will just hold them."
Ex-Cisco CTO Judy Estrin relayed a similar message to a spellbound audience last October. She proclaimed the Internet to be at a "crisis point" and called for architectural leadership. "Internet time is not an excuse not to think," she said. "It's time to make the Internet better, not just faster."
Shake on it
Silicon Valley, sitting squarely between two major earthquake faults, is bordered by at least three major Internet exchanges - WorldCom's MAE West in downtown San Jose; the Palo Alto Internet Exchange; and Equinix, which sits to the south near the railroad tracks on land owned by IBM. A fourth exchange, owned by Pacific Bell, is located in San Francisco.
The San Francisco Bay Area also is home to thousands of square feet of server farms. Exodus claims to host 49 of the top 100 Web sites, was declared part of the US "critical infrastructure" under former President Clinton, and was deemed worthy of federal protection in case of cyber or physical attack.
Arguments run back and forth about what damage a major earthquake really could inflict, but the concentration of exchanges and hosting facilities certainly poses a risk of some disruption. The February 28 quake in Washington state was strong enough to give Teleglobe's Seattle facility some problems, cause several of Sprint's routers in Seattle to become temporarily unreachable, and shut down the Seattle Times' Web site, according to Peter Salus of Matrix.Net.
The physical infrastructure of the Internet is growing so fast and is so intermeshed that anything short of an extended nuclear war probably wouldn't knock it out completely; although knocking out an area like the US West Coast would cause traffic fluctuations that could affect Internet performance for days.
This is a far cry from the late 1980s, when popular lore has it that someone at the NASA Ames Research Center pulled a plug and disconnected all of Sweden. Still, accidents like this sometimes occur. Last month, China Telecom lost substantial communication bandwidth to Japan and the United States when an undersea fibre-optic cable was severed.
A majority of Internet traffic from Europe to Asia still flows through the United States. But while some areas have direct experience with the dangers of such concentrated network infrastructure, there are contrasting stories, like in Yugoslavia. That country's network remained intact throughout the Bosnian war, even though it suffered some damage..
