Eventually, though, every station will have a terminal dedicated to receiving our cuts. We haven't finished coming up with a good backup system. I'm sure we'll have this all worked out soon. After all, the Internet doesn t exist as a separate physical network. For the most part, it s a network of networks built upon the global telephone network.
Internet routers are smart enough to find alternate paths when communications links go down.
But the ability to route to an alternate path depends on the existence of such an alternative. A major outage of a long distance carrier can take huge chunks of the Internet down unless the ISPs involved have built in redundancy. Moreover, today's Internet can t offer guaranteed quality of service. The NPR stations that recovered from Galaxy 4 s death by streaming a feed over the Net were dependent on good luck for congestion to be light. You wouldn t use today s Internet for a daily real time feed except when an emergency forces you to do so.