Quote:
Originally Posted by BOfH
Completely shutting down the internet in this country would be very difficult, if not impossible; local or regional shutdown are definitely possible though. Aside from the fact that the protocols which are responsible for connection and routing of traffic are/were designed for resiliency, there are many ingress and egress points for traffic in this country. Check out http://www.submarinecablemap.com/ to get an idea of the submarine cable landing points here in the US; bear in mind that this doesn't even include domestic backbone circuits belonging to a multitude of carriers. Some recent incident's of note which prove this point were the strong storms( derechos) that passed through central/eastern US during the summer and Hurricane Sandy. During the summer storms, datacenter's in Ashburn, VA which provide peering for many of major backbones on the east coast were knocked offline; while there was some connection issues and traffic degradation, overall, routing protocols designed for this scenario rerouted traffic through other circuits, avoiding the downed links.
My .02 |
I beg to differ that it is impossible; I'm certain the shut off was established before all the high technology was released to the public. They have given the public a tool that they could become dependent on and shutting down the net would cause mass panic and allow more control to be imposed almost instantly. We as a society have become so dependent upon this technology, (computers, cell phones, etc.), that most would sit in their houses and wonder what the hell to do rather than walk down the street to make contact with a friend or relative. I do agree that it will only happen locally at first, just as martial law will.
