jtara - 5:20 am on Oct 23, 2007 (gmt 0)

Lack of peak capacity is a serious issue.

We are relying more and more on the Internet for information - yet key web sites have failed in this particular disaster.

I decided to look at the State of California OES (Office of Emergency Services) website, to see if there is some RSS feed, etc. available.

That was 5 minutes ago. Their home page is still loading.

(Ah - finally loaded - decided it was best to abandon my search and let others use the site to get emergency information...)

Companies such as Amazon - with the EC2 cloud service - could really help - and gain publicity - by making peak capacity available for emergency-services websites.

And free services are available to handle extraordinary peak loads (with caching). Alert slashdot users often use these services to ease the load of a "slashdotting". Certainly, government and emergency-services websites could use these, as well. They just need a little education.

I fear that the whole "just in time" and "just enough capacity" mentality that started with the auto industry has spread way too far in our society. A small example: the UCSD (University of California - San Diego) burn center is full - they have 18 beds. It's the only burn center in San Diego County.

The reverse-911 system seems to be the technology star in this disaster. There have been additional evacuations during the day. I'm guessing that a total of 500,000 people in San Diego will have been successfully evacuated by the time it is over. (Confirmed: OES just announced in a press conference, there have been a total of 260,000 households notified.)

Downside: I was with a friend today who was talking to a friend of his in one of the affected areas. I'd heard on the radio that the area was being evacuated. He was staying put. Why? "I haven't gotten the reverse-911 call yet". It works so damned good that perhaps people are over-confident in it.

Question: as a matter of public policy, should we be allowing phone companies to clip the copper lines when they install FIOS (fiber into the home) service, as AT&T has been doing? Fibre and cable services have maybe a few hours of battery capacity. And the battery backup has multiple potential points of failure - every node from source to destination has to work. (The legacy copper infrastructure is powered from the central offices. The COs have a few hours battery capacity, and then switch to backup generators.)

Some cable systems in San Diego are out, because of routine outages, and employees being told to stay home. Is it premature to abandon copper wires, which have worked extraordinarily well?

It's a truism that every technology peaks in usefulness just before it becomes obsolete. I ain't giving up my obsolete copper wires just yet...