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  From: Glen Turner <glen.turner@aarnet.edu.au>
  To  : Grant <grant@conprojan.com.au>
  Date: Mon, 30 Jul 2001 11:13:27 +0930

Re: Southern Cross.

Grant wrote:
> 
> Isn't the latest issue with the apparently broken segment of the cable
> highlighting the fact that it is trivial to kill any internet link to
> Australia? Doesn't anyone think that this is a nice niche for some form
> terrorism?

The Southern Cross outage was because of two faults, one
on each side of the world.

Terrorism apon communications infrastructure is more than
possible.  In military terms this is called "removing
civilian command and control infrastructure" and is
currently a favoured strategy of the US military.

The targets are not so much the Internet as telephony.
As these converge you can expect Internet-specific
assets to become targets.

The possible adoption of this strategy by non-national
military forces and the ability of Australia's infrastructure
to resist such attacks is the subject of a restricted
report from the Army's Land Warfare Centre.  Dr Adam Cobb
of the ANU's Strategic and Defence Studies Centre
has published a number of papers on the topic.

The US is sufficiently concerned to develop a National Plan
for Critical Infrastructure Protection.  You'll find that
many of its telephone exchanges are already impressively
deep below ground.

As for Southern Cross itself, you get what you pay for.
If you bought a protected circuit you had a four hour
outage.  If you buy capacity from a number of suppliers
(eg: AARNet) only performance diminished.  These
events are to be expected and should be planned for
when making capacity planning decisions.  The problem
for ISPs is they they rely upon others making these
decisions.

As Simon pointed out, content providers can further
distribute their content across a number of ISPs
for even more resilience.

Glen

-- 
 Glen Turner                                 Network Engineer
 (08) 8303 3936      Australian Academic and Research Network
 glen.turner@aarnet.edu.au          http://www.aarnet.edu.au/
--
 The revolution will not be televised, it will be digitised

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