Optus

 Yesterday, for causes still unknown, Optus, Australia's second biggest telco, went off line.

While we all had a bit of a snigger about the lady who found out about the outage by her cat complaining to management that the wifi enabled cat feeder was offline and not dispensing cat nibbles as it should, it does show how dependent we are on the internet.

Imagine the following scenario:

A health worker trying to get to work yesterday - the commuter trains in Melbourne stopped because signalling relies on Optus - and of course because the internet was down they couldn't get a cab or an Uber, and if they were lucky enough to flag down a cab old style, they were unable to pay because the cab's eftpos was down.

Oh, and the hospital couldn't text you to say your appointment was postponed due to staff shortages.

That's just one scenario.

I'm sure there's more. And because the internet is pervasive, when we lose connectivity, the world stops.

Equally, it's not just about the ability to make calls or send texts, its about performing basic tasks like paying bills, ordering your groceries. It's how we consume media, be it Spotify, online radio, or catchup TV - it's notable that outside the cities Australia doesn't do DAB - it's internet based radio in one form or another. 

When I was in rural Tuscany in a village which remarkably had no mobile phone signal, life carried on because there was really good wifi. People texted, made phone calls, even put their rubbish out - the dumpsters were internet enabled and you needed a magic card to open one  - because they had internet access.

So, what the Optus outage shows us is that the internet is the jizz that keeps things running. And because of that we need to consider what steps we need to make to give resilience.

And that's where it gets tricky. People are focusing on roaming as a solution, where if your mobile internet provider goes down you fail over onto another network, much as what happens with SOS calls in rural areas.

However, that's not the complete answer - remember Optus went down, not only taking out their mobile services but their fixed infrastructure NBN based services, which is why some businesses had problems, and that is a trickier one to resolve...