Michael et all, interesting article in Wired,good news I think.
Nobody @Home...
Wired News Report
7:00pm 30.Jul.98.PDT
Not many people, but a lot of hours -- that describes the effects of a service outage suffered by @Home subscribers in Norwalk, Connecticut.
The city's subscribers to the Internet-via-cable-access service lost their connection from 5:30 pm EST Wednesday until early Thursday. The company suspects some kind of "connectivity" problem at the local cable system's head-end.
@Home (ATHM) spokesman Matt Wolfrom said the exact cause of the problem has not been determined, but he ruled out an external attack. He also took the opportunity to point out the event's upside: "The great thing about our network is that it's a distributed network architecture. Instead of having an outage affecting the whole network, we can contain the outage and repair it."
The distributed design uses 26 regional data centers that serve individual local networks. Each contains the servers and software that distribute information to a certain geographic area, pushing data out to customers through the cable system in local communities. The data center serving Norwalk is located in Hartford, Connecticut, yet only the Norwalk area was affected.
The numbers of affected customers is also kept down by @Home's comparatively small subscriber base. As of the end of last year, the company served 50,000 subscribers in portions of 21 cities and communities in the United States and Canada.
And another look at Paul Allen,
wired.com
Hiram |
