Good question but let's ask, When was the last time the internet
died where you happened to be?

	The trouble with disasters is they tend to bite where
you didn't expect. During Hurricane Katrina on a large scale or
the Oklahoma City or the World Trade Center terrorism events,
the first thing to go away was the cellular network.

	In Oklahoma City, the cellular network wasn't damaged by
the bombing but it crashed right around the site of the disaster
due to severe overload.

	In New York City, there was some infrastructure lost,
but, once again, severe overload took out cellular access right
where it was needed most.

	In New Orleans, the water took out lots of cell towers
and killed electric power over a large area so that other cell
towers eventually died when their backup generators ran out of
fuel and nobody could get to them to bring more.

	Basically, if it involves wires and more wires to power
the stuff connected by the first set of wires, anything that
eats wiring infrastructure is a sitting duck for the forces of
entropy.

	I work for Oklahoma State University and we have a large
campus and a good data network but, as luck would have it, there
is a lot of construction going on and contractors have cut power
to major parts of the campus twice in as many weeks.

	Here's what happens:

	The lights and fans go out and we all swear as whatever
we were doing at the time goes POOF! If you have a wireless
device, it continues to work for a few minutes until the UPS's
begin to run out of batteries. As time goes by, more and more
wireless access points and switches die because the bigger UPS's
pass their battery time. They are built to provide power durring
a short outage or flicker, but the big stuff starts dying in an
hour or two or even 30 minutes or so.

	In a couple of hours, it's done and nothing is working
much.

	My point is that amateur radio can get by on less
infrastructure and much more varied infrastructure than any of
the fixed installations anywhere.

	The millitary is probably the only other organization
with communications capability that does not rely on commercial
infrastructure.

73 WB5AGZ
Howard Kaufman writes:
> So when was the last time the Internet went down?