Half of U.S. lacks network backup systems to withstand outages

Half of U.S. lacks network backup systems to withstand outages

Published 31 March 2015

About half of the rural United States lacks access to high-speed Internet service, and since 2009, the U.S. Agriculture and Commerce departments have provided roughly $10 billion in grants and loans to expand broadband Internet access. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) also plans to distribute about $20 billion in funds over the next five years to support rural broadband, but the federal government does not require recipients to build network backup systems against outages.While most major cities have backup systems to withstand outages, in most rural areas, damage to a fiber-optic cable will lead to a temporary loss of Internet and phone service.

About half of the rural United States lacks access to high-speed Internet service, and since 2009, the U.S. Agriculture and Commerce departments have provided roughly $10 billion in grants and loans to expand broadband Internet access. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) also plans to distribute about $20 billion in funds over the next five years to support rural broadband, but the federal government does not require recipients to build network backup systems against outages.
While most major cities have backup systems to withstand outages, in most rural areas, damage to a fiber-optic cable will lead to a temporary loss of Internet and phone service. “The more rural the location, the more likely that there’s only one road in and out of that location,” said Sean Donelan, a former DHS Cybersecurity Program Manager. “If someone manages to cut that fiber, you’ll generally see a one- or two- or three-day outage.”
For the past two decades, the federal government has warned about the vulnerabilities of not having backup systems, but since Internet service is largely unregulated by federal and state agencies, final decisions about network reliability are left to service providers, who generally do not build backup systems or redundancies, unless they find it financially beneficial. According to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, co-chairman of President Barack Obama’s newly created Broadband Opportunity Council, the federal government’s first responsibility is to make sure people “actually have service,” Internet providers are then encouraged to adopt backup systems.
The Star Tribune reports that in northern Arizona last month, tens of thousands of residents spent fifteen hours without Internet service after vandals cut through a underground bundle of fiber-optic cables owned by CenturyLink. ATMs could not operate and retailers were unable to process credit cards. In 2013, Washington state’s San Juan Islands were without Internet and phone service for ten days after an underwater fiber-optic cable became wrapped around a rock and broke. Aerospace consultant Mike Loucks, was shocked to find out that his home phone, cellphone, and Internet service did not work on separate cable lines. “When I figured out what all had been routed to this cable, it’s a single-point failure thing,” he said. “That’s pretty dumb. Why don’t you guys have a backup cable?”
With more than ten million miles of fiber-optic cables deployed annually in the United States, the number of outages due to damage from backhoes, trench-diggers, and vandalism has more than doubled from 221 in 2010 to 487 in 2014, according to the FCC.
Spokeswoman Linda Johnson for CenturyLink, the broadband provider in the Arizona and San Juan Islands outages said the company acts quickly to restore service and “is constantly investing in its local network and strives to deliver new services and build redundancy where possible.”