The Unreliability Of The Internet

The other day I started my day by trying to catch up on email but I couldn't connect to my company's Exchange server. I tried OWA but couldn't reach the web server. So I sparked up Traceroute and saw that Traceroute was timing out. I called my support people so see if it was just me or everyone, but they had no trouble tickets. I called Verizon tech support and they were no help. A few hours later, things got back to normal, but as a teleworker I was cut off.

The connectivity issue was intermittent over a few hours. I could reach some web sites like www.yahoo.com but not mail.google.com (Gmail). The Internet wasn't self-healing on this occasion. Since it has been 10 or more years since I faced a connectivity issues of any kind due to Internet problems, I had no idea what the paths normally look like. But I did know the following:

My call to Verizon FiOS tech-support was an exercise in patience. The support person wanted to walk me through her check list starting with "Is my network plugged in?". I ended that call politely, but quickly. I knew my network and network connection was fine. The problem was out there, but I wasn't going to make headway through Verizon's support channels. Luckily, my company has two VPN gateways on different coasts, so I could get to Exchange through our other VPN gateway. A few hours later, the Internet connectivity was restored and all was well.

However, I lost a bit of faith in the reliability of the Internet to deliver robust connectivity. Where is the much talked about routing around problems everyone is quick to point out? I was cut off for several hours and I didn't have a reason why or know when service would be restored.

For the record, I recognize that my lost faith is unreasonable. The network of networks works, works well, and is much more reliable today than it was 7 years ago. But if my company didn't have an alternative VPN gateway for me to use, or if that network path was degraded or down, I wouldn't have been able to get any connection. Dead in the water. Sure, I could and did get some work done in the meanwhile, but I was incommunicado. The failure is just a reminder that failures do happen and a back-up plan is necessary.

The impact on a remote office is much worse because more people are affected and the longer network connectivity is lost, the worse that impact becomes. There are a two things that you can do if you are relying on the Internet to interconnect your offices, particularly if the offices are on different service providers.

Consider having an alternate VPN site on a different network on a different geographic location so that if a temporary failure in one part of the Internet cuts office off, they can connect to an alternate location. These are pretty low cost ideas compared to the cost of downtime.