Our Internet backbones are so clumped together that a simple backhoe can do a ton of damage.
As the fiber came spooling out of the desert soil like a fishing line, long-distance service for millions of Sprint PCS and Nextel wireless customers west of the Rockies blinked off. Transcontinental internet traffic routed over Sprint slowed to a crawl, and some corporations that relied on the carrier to link office networks found themselves electronically isolated.
In the end, a hole dug out of a dirt road outside a town called Buckeye triggered a three-and-a-half hour outage with national impact. It wasn't even a very deep hole. "We ran into their line right away," says Johansson.
I hope companies can take care of this significant problem soon. Otherwise we'll be issuing government inquiries into why no one knew this could have been prevented earlier.
