Before Galaxy 4 died, probably only a couple hundred people in the United States realized that virtually every pager in the country depended on a single satellite to deliver vital pages. After the outage, many millions of users knew about that single point of failure. Some doctors slept in hospitals rather than miss pages concerning critically ill patients. As Matt Ferguson explains, the Internet can provide many advantages, but users have to evaluate risks of moving from dedicated communications to Internet communications. Fortune 500 companies are beginning to rely on the Internet for IP telephony and for virtual private networks.
Enlightened customers work with their ISPs to try to eliminate single points of failure.
Despite the best efforts of ISPs and their customers, no doubt we ll learn about many other single points of failure involving traditional communications paths, or Internet links, or both only after something important to our lives falls silent. Comments are welcome Produced by Rich Wiggins and Copyright 2001 INT Media Group, Incorporated All Rights Reserved. Learning Perl, 3rd Ed. All Rights Reserved.