After several weeks of postcard-perfect weather we were due, weren't we?
This week we had wind and thunder and lighting and all those great performances of the sky god. And someplace in there on Thursday morning a branch met a cable and for the next five hours or so anyone who relied on online access via Comcast to run their business was off the air.
Comcast's spokesman would confirm only that wind and branch were the cause of the outage. No information on official geography, number of customers or actual length of down time were available. However, reports from the field say that pretty much all zip codes across the Cape were out.
It was the talk of every place I wandered Thursday morning and into the afternoon. Over breakfast at the Fairway (awesome homemade hash!), people from Wellfleet and Eastham were comparing notes on how they had not been able to start the early morning with their early morning email download - did anyone one know what was happening? The television set was dead, so the consensus was that Comcast was down.
In voice mail on the cell after breakfast, I found commentary from a couple of people in Barnstable, wondering if I knew anything about this outage. A quick check with a couple of other companies confirmed that Hyannis, Dennis, Yarmouth, and maybe a few other places were out too.
A few hours later at Cape Cup in Orleans (where I sipped a restorative au lait) a steady stream of people flowed through with laptops in tow one after another hoping to find connectivity. Notes were exchanged on possible sources of connectivity.
About half the people appeared to be local businesses trying to keep up with the day's work while the other half appeared to be summer visitors who were keeping up with their businesses remotely. "When will it be back on?" turned out to be as bonding a topic as the weather or the best way to drive from point A to point B usually is around here.
I took an excellent dried cherry and chocolate biscotti on the road me with as I checked in with other locations.
Out in Wellfleet, a real estate office I dropped by had given up its morning routine of online updates and research. Someone in West Barnstable was wondering where to go to pay her mortgage online, the #1 task on the agenda for the day. Over in Mashpee, my favorite police and fire log fix, Cape Wide News, had its fire scanner service knocked off the air. At our home base, the Community College, there was a reduction of bandwidth available to the College from approximately 25Mbps to 3Mbps, but at least there was some connection still in place.
And some connection is better than none, which brought me to a blog that's written by cable television journalist Marianne Paskowski for TV Week. She's at her Orleans home this week.
"My philosophy is when you live on a spit of sand jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean, you just can't put all of your eggs into one nest, and that's why I have DSL, a landline phone and cable only for TV," she wrote.
You see, this outage is nothing unusual. Here on the Cape power goes out. Phone lines go out. Cable goes out. It happens. I'm not bashing Comcast because a tree met a cable somewhere.
But what was striking was the level to which connectivity is interwoven into business function, a level that gets highlighted when the connectivity goes away for hours. And hours.
We've not talking about watching TV or a movie here. Connectivity is about doing business.
This was a tiny little windstorm. It took us off the air for five hours. What would a big storm do? Are we ready for it?
When we talk about the data transport network that is under construction, the nonprofit Open Cape, we use the word redundancy a lot. One frequently asked question is "why are you planning to spend money on multiples of everything?"
Redundancy is good.
Repeat after me: multiple paths and multiple options are good. Redundancy makes sense.
When it comes to an essential business and public safety service, we can't have our eggs in one nest or even one basket! We need to plan for a falling tree, an ice storm, raging weather in the Atlantic, and an errant backhoe. We need wireless connections and fiber connections and TBD technology connections.
While a plethora of paths might not please the duopoly of Verizon and Comcast, those are the paths we should plan for. The more the merrier!
Not everyone is going to own multiple access services or reach into multiple data transport networks, but when there are many options in play we, in the aggregate, are building redundancy and backup.
People were trekking around seeking out possible locations for connectivity NOT because they wanted to catch the latest installment of Ellen or because they wanted to send a chatty email to Great Aunt Grace. No, this was a search for the communication networks that are integrated into nearly every aspect of business function, and that business need was the driving force.
The loss of connectivity for a better part of the day is a news story because it created lost productivity. And it is a news story because it is a low-key wake up call to the way our businesses function and the way we need to look at connectivity as an essential service.
Service went on again and all was back to normal by the end of the day on Thursday. But, as thunder and lighting rolls across our Peninsula again tonight, it's a reminder that a day without connectivity isn't business as usual.
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