I usually load a blog every morning between 7:00 and 8:00 eastern. But today my Internet was down. I first noticed then when I woke up around 2:30. Don’t even ask why I was up then, but that is not unusual for me. My Internet outage was also not that unusual. I have Comcast as my ISP and they seem to go out a few times per month. I’ve always given them the benefit of the doubt and assumed that a few of the late night outages are due to routine network maintenance.

So I grab my cell phone to turn on my mobile hot spot. Most of the outages here last an hour or two and that is the easy way to get through outages. But bam! – AT&T is out too. I have no bars on my LTE network. So my first thought is cable cut. The only realistic way that both carriers go out in this area is if the whole area is isolated by a downed fiber.

I check back and hit a few web sites and I find at about 3:00 that I have a very slow Facebook connection, but that it’s working. I can get Facebook updates and I can post to Facebook, but none of the links outside of Facebook work. And nothing else seems to be working. This tells me that Facebook has a peering arrangement of some kind with Comcast and must come into the area by a different fiber than the one that was cut.

So I start looking around. The first thing I find is that Netflix is working normally, just as fast as ever. So now I have a slow Facebook feed and fast Netflix and still nothing else. After a while Google starts working. It wasn’t working earlier, but it seems that I can search Google, although none of the links work. This tells me that Comcast peers with Google but that the Google links use the open Internet. I force a few links back through the Google URL just to see if that will work and I find that I can read links through Google. No other search engines seem to be working.

The only other think I found that worked with the NFL highlight films and I was able to see the walk-off blocked punt in last night’s Ravens – Browns game. It’s highly unlikely that the NFL has a peering relationship with anybody and they must have a deal with Google.

So now I know a bit about the Comcast Network. They peer with Netflix, Google and Facebook – and since these are three of the largest traffic producers on the web that is not unusual. And at least in my area the peering comes into the area on a different fiber path than the normal Internet backbone that has knocked out both Comcast and AT&T.

But I also now know that in my area that Comcast has no redundancy in the network. I find this interesting because most of my small clients insist on having redundancy in their networks. Of course, most of them operate in rural areas that are used to getting isolated when cables get cuts – it happened for many years with telephone lines and now with the Internet.

But I can see that Comcast hasn’t bothered creating a redundant network. This particular outage went for 7 or 8 hours which is a bit long, so this must be from a major fiber cut. But I look at a map of Florida and it is a natural candidate to have rings. Everybody lives on one of the two coasts and there are several major east-west connector roads. This makes for natural rings. And if our backbone was on a ring we wouldn’t even know there was an outage. But with all of their billions of dollars of profits, neither Comcast nor AT&T wireless cares enough about redundancy to have put our area backbone on a ring.

And I also don’t understand why they don’t have automatic alternate routing to bypass a fiber cut. If Netflix, Facebook and Google were connected everything else could have been routed along those same other fibers. That is something else my clients would have done to minimize outages for customers.

This is honestly unconscionable and perhaps it’s time we start clamoring to the FCC to require the big companies to plow some of their profits back into a better network. These same sort of outages happened a few times to the power grid a decade ago and the federal response was that the electric companies had to come up with a better network that could stop rolling outages. I know some of my clients that are electric companies spent some significant dollars towards that effort, and it seems to have worked. Considering how important the Internet has become for our daily lives and for commerce perhaps it’s time for the FCC to do the same thing.