The idea of life without the internet is beyond my understanding.

I am not talking about living without the internet, of course we can all do that. I just can’t imagine how anyone can say that the internet connection that they need – for example, for a home business – is down for a week or more.

Maybe this comes from my work as a consultant building secure data centers and call centers that needed 100% uptime.

The expert drawing to the right is supposed to represent where I live. I don’t actually live in a turquoise rectangle, but you get the idea. I have the luck of living near the boarder where 2 departments – sort of like US states – come together. The red arrow is the path that one telephone line follows from the France Telecom central in the Yvelines and the blue arrow from the central that is part of Seine et Marne (2 different French departments or ’states’).

I have 2 landlines entering the house at different entry points, so if a truck crashes into the house, they can only take one line down, unless the house is totally destroyed I would still have a working telephone connection.Once I built a call center for a French hotel chain who had a similar setup – redundant phone lines, redundant power and a generator. The problem that they had was all the phone and power lines met up in one place in the basement and followed one path to the actual call center on the fifth floor. They had a fire in the underground parking just before I was called in, and the car the burned had the misfortune of being parked under the point where all power and phone lines came together.

They had a great beginning of a plan, with a single point of failure.

Electricity to Run the Internet Connection

I have redundant power in the house. Electricity from the local power company that supports my neighborhood  and a generator with enough fuel to run the house for several months – at least 2 full months in the dead of winter. Having a fuel generator is very common in France, my fuel tank is buried in the back yard and holds 3500 liters of diesel fuel. I need to manually switch over, but the downtime could be one minute or less. Side note, not related to the interent connection, is that we cook using bottled gas. As a backup here, if I forget to get a bottle, we have electric hotplates and an oven that will fill the gap as I wait a day to go get the 2 bottles replaced (haven’t needed to do that).

Then I have 2 mobile phones in the house, from 2 different carriers. Each can be bluetoothed to a hub and give 3G connection to the internet. One phone  is an iPhone 3G that has an app allowing any computer to use the phone as a hub to connect to the interent. The second phone is just a standard phone with an internet connection and it can act as a hub, but I onle get an Edge connection with this carrier.

With the Linux-based Maemo operating platform, 32GB of storage and multiple options of connectivity including access for 3G data networks, consumers no longer need to leave everything that makes them them – their email, favorite websites, social communities, images, music – anywhere but on their Nokia N900. With the Nokia N900, you don’t have to worry about missing that next great moment.

Like I said, the idea of life without the internet is beyond my understanding.

For full disclosure, I don’t actually live in a turquoise rectangle, but that really is a map of the street where I live.