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When the big earthquake of 1989 hit the San Francisco Bay Area, my then 11-year-old son and I were at the World Series game at Candlestick Park, waiting for the Giants and the A's to duke it out. You may remember this game: The earthquake was telecast in real time as it happened, just minutes before the contest was to start as we waited for the opening ceremony to begin.
Geek that I am, I had taken my handheld TV, transistor radio, pocket police scanner, and a cell phone the size of a brick to the game. My family laughed at me for bringing all of these things to a live game—and to be honest, I got some pretty odd looks from the people around me as I sat there watching the game preliminaries on this tiny screen and talking to my wife on the phone before the game started.
Then the earthquake struck, and Candlestick Park lunged forward and rumbled for a good 60 seconds. All of a sudden I was a genius to my family and the people around me. I immediately called my wife to see if she and the house were okay, then called my mom and other family members to check on them. They had been watching the game from home and feared we had been hurt, but I assured them we were all right. Good thing I acted as quickly as I did: Soon after I made my last call, cell-phone service in the entire Bay Area went down. Minutes later the landlines went down, too, as did most of the electricity. TV and radio stations switched to backup generators and kept pumping out the news.
But since I had my battery-powered TV and the police scanner, everyone in my section at least had access to news of what was really going on. Some 50 people were trying to watch my little TV and the first televised pictures of the collapse of the Bay Bridge. And we were listening to radio reports and police chatter with real-time news about this tragedy. Ironically, it took the stadium officials about 20 minutes to figure out that the game had to be called and to ask people to leave in an orderly manner.
Most people didn't learn of the severity of the situation until they got into their cars and turned on their radios. But our little group had the technology at hand to become well informed about the situation. I even had my route home figured out before we left the stadium.
The information and communication blackout surrounding us came to memory last week when vandals cut fiber-optic cables at an underground station 3 miles south of my home in San Jose. The cables were owned by AT&T but also affected Verizon landline and cell phones, since Verizon leases these lines from AT&T for the South Bay Area. Because I reside north of this cable cut, my service wasn't affected, but my son and his family live in Morgan Hill. All of his phone and Internet connections were down for most of the day. Underground cables were also cut in San Carlos, 20 miles south of San Francisco, and that ended up affecting thousands of people. In fact, even some big companies lost their Internet connections while AT&T and Verizon were still looking into the problem.
If you've ever had your cell phone or Internet connection go down even for a short time, you can relate to the frustration these businesses and consumers felt. The dollar impact of this event has not yet been calculated, but clearly businesses and consumers lost some productivity. Even worse, the vandalism affected the local police, fire, and ambulance services, as well as making it virtually impossible for tens of thousands of people to call these services in case of an emergency. (Local ham-radio operators jumped into action, fortunately, becoming a key communications medium between first-responder services and setting up way stations at strategic locations for people who might be experiencing an emergency.)
This incident caused a lot of reflection in Silicon Valley about our reliance on dedicated services such as cell phones and broadband Internet connections. And it has revived fears about overdependence on cloud computing. We're already dependent on the Internet for information, communications, and commerce, and we're starting to rely on it for real-time delivery of applications. And now we're putting all of our digital bits in one Internet basket and becoming more reliant on the cloud without even realizing it.
Although this was an isolated event, the fact that vandals were able to pull this off rather easily should give everyone pause about making the Internet the sole backbone for information and emergency services, as well as our own personal digital storage vault. Add to that the news that cyber criminals have infiltrated our power grid and the constant attempts by nefarious forces to penetrate our network infrastructure, and all of the sudden the concept of "everything in the cloud" becomes a bit frightening, especially to consumers.
Consumers may be getting more comfortable with putting their pictures online or even banking online, but I'm convinced that the need for personal servers, storage, and localized computing in consumer markets will be here for some time. At the business, financial, e-commerce, and hosted-cloud service levels, I know redundant systems and backup transformers keep services live 24/7. But that's viable only if consumers have a wired or wireless connection to these services working all the time (or should I say, when they really need it?). Given this attack, and the constant reports that our networks are being attacked, consumers will be inclined to keep a lot of their digital stuff locally for years to come.
-----------------------------BY Tim Bajarin
Source：pcmag
Tim Bajarin is one of the leading analysts working in the technology industry today. He is president of Creative Strategies (www.creativestrategies.com), a research company that produces strategy research reports for 50 to 60 companies annually—a roster that includes semiconductor and PC companies, as well as those in telecommunications, consumer electronics, and media. Customers have included AMD, Apple, Dell, HP, Intel, and Microsoft, among many others. You can e-mail him directly at tim@creativestrategies.com.
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