San Francisco, Nov 26: The Web worked fairly well in the Blackout of 2003, but don't disconnect your telephone service just yet, advises a new report on communications infrastructure. The August blackout that hit the United States and Canada didn't knock out the major pathways of the World Wide Web, but it did cut Internet connectivity for banks, hospitals and thousands of other businesses. That shows the global network needs more investment before replacing the telephone system as the primary communications infrastructure, concludes a recent study from Hanover, New Hampshire-based Renesys, a provider of Internet monitoring services.
The largest Internet backbone networks, the major arteries of data traffic worldwide, were apparently unaffected by the blackout. However, thousands of significant networks and millions of Internet users were offline for hours or days, according to the report, titled "Impact of the 2003 Blackouts on Internet Communications."
"Banks, investment funds, business services, manufacturers, hospitals, educational institutions, Internet service providers, and federal and state government units were among the affected organizations," said the report.
The scale and duration of the Internet connectivity outages indicate that the Internet is not ready to become the main communications infrastructure in the United States without additional investment in higher-quality interconnection and backup power, the report concluded.
Bureau Report