[EAS] IPAWS OPEN failure

[Alex Hartman]

>Bottom line is the need to get information to the public FAST and ACCURATELY.

Using the internet to do these two things is mutually exclusive. Pick one only. ;)

I agree that using the public infrastructure can be as redundant as any private system, and it's already in place. But we've already seen an outage caused by lack of forethought. Something that is mission critical and considered a matter of national security is NOT running on a cable modem/FIOS from Verizon, that said, they've exposed a weakness in that it is running on a single carrier. That link might be a DS3 or something like that, but i'm pretty sure they're not stupid enough to use a "business grade" link for something considered "national security", which CAP/EAS -as far as i'm concerned- is.

Yes all big systems (like google, apple, etc) can and do experience outages. However it is not without saying that someone at the top of the design heap should've thought about these redundancies in the beginning using multiple network links from multiple providers. Even a Hughesnet dish as a back up would work just fine, but have a back up! 

Out of curiosity, any other Government services go down during this outage? What else was effected, if anything? They may be taking a step back and looking for the bigger picture here and finding that say the entire FEMA network was taken down by this single router outage and making a plan for the department as a whole. This could take a while, considering FEMAs track record on speed and the governments response rate to new contracts. ;)

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Alex Hartman