High Speed Breakdown

Picture shows a cable outage in December 2008 that almost cut off all internet services in Egypt.

We've become used to it being there anytime, anyplace and almost anywhere. The answer to every question instantly accessible at the tap of a button, but what happens when it something goes wrong? What happens when there isn't any Internet? I'm not talking about the domestic irritant when your laptop won't connect, I'm talking about half a continent losing its connection to the web.

At the end of last week, much of West Africa was rendered offline after its fibre-optic umbilical chord was cut, immediately removing around 70% of Nigeria's bandwidth.

The knock on effects of this got me thinking. An outage on this scale isn’t just an annoyance, it’s hugely expensive both in time and money and, potentially dangerous. This one for example, caused widespread and severe disruption to the banking sector, government, the police and mobile phone networks. 

Ladi Okuneye, chief marketing officer of Suburban Telecom, which provides the majority of Nigeria's bandwidth said, of the damaged cable, "SAT-3 is currently the only fibre optic cable serving West Africa… so all West African countries have to use it." Although countries like Benin switched to satellite in an attempt to combat the effects, both Togo and Niger remain offline and it will take some time to restore Internet services to large parts of Nigeria.

Connectivity in the UK is far more robust than that of West Africa, as we hurtle towards a life where 99.9% of our lives and our businesses rely on being online, are we even remotely prepared as a nation for that moment - should it come - when our access gets cut?

What if our broadband Internet infrastructure was severely damaged by war or natural catastrophe? Has anyone thought to back up the back up? We tend to assume that someone else must have taken care of it, but what would happen if we were wrong?

Back in September last year the government published a paper reviewing the Barriers to Investment in Next Generation Access, known as NGA. This suggested that there was no immediate need to invest significantly in improving the UK’s fibre-optic broadband infrastructure, but highlighted that we cannot afford to be complacent either.

While we move towards the vision of a Digital Britain with it’s promise of broadband connectivity for all, we’d be wise to remember that even in the high-tech, fast-moving, ‘always on’ developed world, there's still room for vulnerability.

The Internet has become like electricity or water – we use it without thinking, and only notice it when it’s gone. We therefore need to protect access to it as we do other resources to ensure that we don’t experience a high-speed breakdown.