I knew a guy who ran an dial-up ISP out of the utility closet in his garage, and his longest outage was 6 hours, most of it spent driving to pick-up needed parts.

That approach may maximize profits, but it doesn’t provide a robust system.

As someone involved in Arpa.net and AARNet, I can second that!!

These days Gov is almost indistinguishable from the Corp’s. The greedy bastards move from the Corp world into Gov. *shrug* So, why would anyone be surprised?

Mr. Duff, the Arpa.net, Darpa,net, and NSF.net that were the basis for the Internet were all funded by the Federal government and worked fine. It was the greed that was injected after it was decided that it might make money, and the taxpayers should never be allowed to recoup their investments, when the private sector could suck off the profits. It happens with most medical and technological advances that have occurred lately – the taxpayers pay for the research and then private industry gets the profits.

The basic design principles behind the Internet make what happened to me all but impossible, as it was designed to function in the event of nuclear attack and route around outages. It is only in the private industry developed nodes that it is possible for the network to fail because they are designed to be as cheap as possible with no redundancy.

That approach may maximize profits, but it doesn’t provide a robust system.

Yeah… I know how that goes!

Good luck Bryan, and stay warm and dry m8! (And I’ll try to stay cool, which may include getting wet!) 😉