How an ISP kept business afloat, despite the undersea Internet Disaster.

 

Internet Outages: History repeats itself!

 

Two years is a long time to ignore and forget. In December 2006, a massive earthquake made the Richter scale jump up to 7.1! Of course, it was a major human catastrophe but an unexpected externality also came as a rude shock. The movement of the tectonic plates severed multiple undersea internet cables, and left the whole of Taiwan and majority of East Asia bereft of internet connectivity for two whole months.

Two years later, history repeated itself and yet, there was much hue and cry. Two years ago was the time to learn! Such disasters don't give much warning signals before arriving- not even as much as a knock. They just storm in and knock you down. Alarm bells went off for our business, ICG or I Call Globe, which relies heavily on VOIP technology for its operations. ICG sprang into action immediately.

We analysed our internet connectivity and came up with back up plans. We also heard a couple of scoffing remarks back then, saying we were being paranoid! Following are a couple of things we planned for, which have truly come to our rescue in today's crisis.

• Multi-homing: We switched over from a single ISP with a single provider to a Multi- homing network. In Multi-homing, the ISP maintains connectivity through various providers, each having a separate backbone. In case of a break down in one pipeline, the ISP automatically switches over to a different one.
  


• Connectivity Loop: We did our research and made sure the ISP could maintain a connectivity loop. For instance, if one provider had undersea cables running through the Atlantic Ocean, the other provider we chose had cables routed via the Pacific Ocean.
  


• Higher Bandwidth: We contracted with our upstream ISP's such that our total available bandwidth at any given time would be 30% higher than our base requirement. Planning for this extra cushion of bandwidth has helped us cruise through peak times and crises like this one. Our customers were able to maintain a constant line of communication throughout and never even felt a glitch!
  

Case in point here is that, planning for Redundancy is, in fact, not redundant at all. The extra investment that we made earlier has certainly paid off today, as the internet slowdown has not been able to nibble away our revenues. We are filled with a sense of pride in our contingency planning when our customers call for assistance and we are still connected throughout.