Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Oops … I may have brought down the Internet in Ontario and New Brunswick ….

Kidding. But is it a coincidence that I blog about our larcenous data rates in Canada and today my Internet access implodes?

I wonder Smile

About an hour ago -- at about 10:30am on 5 March -- my Internet crashed completely. It was a palpable event, since I was on a conference call to the office and suddenly all of my computers and virtual machines flashed and reported loss of connectivity at once. And the line went dead, of course.

Luckily, I can work just fine with the local intranet here at home, but I work more efficiently when I can research on the Internet at the Eclipse site etc. What chaps my a$$ is the fact that our data rates remain the highest in the entire world (wow, something we are really, really good at … Oh Canada, our home and …) and yet these DNS issues (this appears to be that) happen several times per year, leaving random thousands without service for sometimes rather long periods.

This is deeply painful, leaving one to wonder what exactly our ultra-high rates are paying for, exactly. (Hint: huge bonuses for executives would probably be a very good start if you want to start a tally.)

Update (even before it gets published): My internet access was down for so long that the timer I set on publishing this commentary came and went without anything happening … it eventually came back somewhere around 4pm.