Lumison, one of the UK's leading business-class ISPs, has published a brief essay on the implications of current flooding and the industry’s wider sensitivity to risks in the future.
“The potent combination of flood risk in the Thames gateway, potentially affecting London Docklands, and datacenter pricing rising by almost 300% in 18 months means that we need a fundamental rethink” said Aydin Kurt-Elli, Lumison CEO. He added, “There is no doubt that the costs of decentralising the UK Internet infrastructure will be far outweighed by the implications of doing nothing.”
With key Internet peering points such as LINX all based in London, and many smaller ISPs entirely reliant on a handful of neutral datacenter operators in the Docklands area of London, Dr Kurt-Elli proposes that we may be sleep walking into a national network disaster should the worst happen. With the flooding incidents around the country in June and July of 2007, and the ageing Thames barrier reaching the end of its shelf life, this scenario may not be as far fetched as it may seem.
The Lumison essay “Underwater Internet” is available for download at http://www.lumison.net/
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