On Dec 21, 2010, at 9:57 AM, Daniel Feiglin wrote:
Does anyone
remember the Internet problems around 11/09/2001? (Incidentally I
could
level the same objection to international web based mail accounts like
gmail, But that's another story.)
I'd worry more about the internet outages when Pakistan tried to block
YouTube and took down a large portion of the Internet. Or the
outage(s) when a ship in the Med dropped anchor in the wrong place and
cut the fiber optic cables to everyone except Israel. We still had
lots of bandwidth to the rest of the world, but no one was letting us
use it.
Or the days when every time someone picked up the phone and received
or made a call outside of the Israel, the internet lines lost 8k bits
per second throughput. One ISP claimed to have the biggest bandwidth
to the US, what they did not mention is that it was shared with their
large telephone business which had priority. Even that was not enough,
I remember in 2001 when you could not get an ISDN call to the UK at
3pm on a weekday.
The problem is that while there are multiple points of entry into
Israel from outside, they probably could be counted on the fingers of
one hand.
My experience has been that having two separate lines with 2 distinct
ISPs does not significantly increase the reliability rate beyond local
connections. If my connections to my ISPs are working I have the same
successes or problems getting to a site (or a country) over both of
them.
What it does REDUCE is the situation when one line into my home from
the outside world is down. It's become almost impossible to tell with
the aDSL line now that NGN has replaced it here. The aDSL line I have
no longer goes from me to the local phone switch, it goes less than
100 meters to a box which is connected via fiber optic to the phone
switch. So it is always up, no matter what connectivity it has beyond
my street.
Geoff.
--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, N3OWJ/4X1GM
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to misquote it.
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