The attack by vandals last month on a fiber-optic cable in northern Arizona pointed out a major vulnerability in the country’s Internet infrastructure: the lack of backup systems.
Cutting through the CenturyLink cable left tens of thousands of people without Internet service for up to 15 hours. It shut down ATMs, left stores without a way to process credit cards and even left some areas without 911 service.
Because Internet service is largely unregulated by the government, network reliability is left to the service providers, who generally only build redundancies into the system if it’s financially worthwhile.
As a result, while most major metropolitan areas have backup systems, the FCC says about half the rural areas in the country do not.
Since 2009 the United States Agriculture and Commerce Departments have been providing billions in grants and loans to expand Internet access.
And while the companies that got the money were encouraged to build redundancies into their projects, they were not required to do so.