Re: [tlug] What would happen to the Internet if the US fell off the map

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Josh Glover writes:

 > In an emergency situation, I think it would not be unreasonable to
 > assume that someone could lay a trans-South-Atlantic or -Pacific cable
 > in a matter of weeks. I may be wrong; I am no Cable & Wireless
 > consultant. ;)

Well, among other things I suspect the relevant equipment and
manufacturers are booked up for a couple years in advance.

 > Also, satellites are not used so heavily in today's Internet due to
 > latency, but in an emergency, I think a bunch of satellite links would
 > spring into existence.

There's not that much excess capacity in satellites, the capacity has
been shifted to other uses like HDTV I believe.  And we still have
only about two viable commercial satellite launch services at present
(and one of them is the space shuttle ;-).

Remember, in Kobe most of the relevant equipment and lines was OK; it
was just a matter of finding and mending breaks.  Here we're talking
about cables measured in thousands of kilometers.

 > > This implies (AFAICS) a hierarchical network, and thus
 > > chokepoints where throttling will be effective.  So Josh's argument
 > > has a chance to be effective:
 > >
 > >  > I agree with all of this. But why do you assume that the ISPs are
 > >  > sitting on their hands? No halfway decent network admin will rely on
 > >  > the clients' TCP stacks playing nice; they'll start changing routing
 > >  > policies and choking way back on the throttles so their queues don't
 > >  > overflow.
 > 
 > And remember, I do not claim to know much about the implementation of
 > the Internet,

I don't either.  I'm basing my arguments on theoretical economic
arguments plus a general faith the engineers will make things work
because, well, that's what engineers do.

In other words, I think that you're right, that the Internet would
probably recover enough capacity to be a going concern again within
weeks.  Some of that would come from additional capacity either newly
installed or reallocated from other uses, and a lot would come from
conservation measures (eg, banning Word and Excel attachments ;-).

But the only prediction I'm willing to put money on is that none of us
will successfully predict where the salvation of the net would come
from in such an event.