08 May 2001
Technology and Redundancy
The telephone service in my part of Montrose (maybe a larger area) has been out all day today due to a main cable disruption. Fortunately, this has had precious little impact on me today even though I am working from home: the internet connection is cable, I can call out with my cell phone, and people who really need to contact me know to use the email or the cell phone number anyway. If anything, this little outage has been a positive, since telemarketers have not been able to get through to bother me, raising the question of whether I should even keep traditional phone service in the first place.
There is, of course, a significant reason I should, and that's redundancy -- should the cable internet have problems, there's always the traditional phone service as a backup (much as the cell phone is a backup to the traditional phone service for voice calls). Thinking this through, I wondered about the wired home of the future. Ten years down the road, it's not inconceivable to think that traditional phone lines and cable lines and dsl lines will have been replaced by some sort of fiber-optic powered digital information pipe running into homes (Sprint ION service is a crude early prototype), which will deliver music, phone, voice, internet, data in any way users wish to pull and push it. What happens when THAT line is cut? How does one build redundancy into such a system? And aren't "redundancy experts" likely to become a new sort of in-demand IT professional?
[Posted @ 05:33 PM CST]
