The Trouble with Wires

Late last week, a group of hooligans in California cut fiber optic lines in two locations near Silicon Valley. As a result, thousands of business and consumer customers of AT&T, Verizon and Sprint were without service. According to an IDG News article by Stephen Lawson, the outage affected:

o Two IBM facilities
o The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA)
o Wired and wireless customers using AT&T’s network
o 52,000 wireline customers of Verizon Communications (Verizon also uses the AT&T fibers)
o Sprint’s wireline IP data service for businesses as well as some mobile service from the carrier

Every few months, we hear about this type of outage. Whether the fiber/wire damage was caused by rain, construction or vandalism as in this case, the result is always the same – downtime that can be crippling, especially for businesses.

Incidents like this are a perfect example of why companies need to consider wireless broadband technology – either as a primary or secondary connection.

Towerstream’s service, for instance, is completely independent of the phone company and its fiber wires. When fiber is damaged in one of our markets, Towerstream’s customers are unaffected. Our networks also have built in redundancy – so if one of our Points of Presence (PoPs) is damaged, service will automatically re-route, uninterrupted. In fact, we even offer a service level agreement that guarantees 99.99% network availability.

While Towerstream is often the primary broadband supplier for many businesses, some of our customers instead use our service as a secondary solution, ready as a back-up should the primary line go down.

When selecting a back-up line, the key is to make sure the provider’s service doesn’t eventually route through the network of your primary carrier. The Verizon customers that experienced an outage due to last week’s fiber cut are a perfect example of this. Though they were contracted with Verizon, their service ran over AT&T’s lines. So if a business was using AT&T as the primary provider and Verizon as the back-up, they would have still suffered a total outage.

Still not sure if wireless broadband is really more reliable than wireline? Check out this recent video that shows just how easily networks from the phone company can be disrupted. Scary stuff.