How resilient is the internet?  

The original concept of the internet was as a secure network, a web, with alternative route-round connections to limit the loss of communication under a nuclear threat.  So it’s secure then?  So how come we have all experienced internet ‘outages’ at some times in our homes and businesses? 

The impact of the web is very deep and it feels very permanent.  Like many businesses, we now depend utterly upon the web.  But what if it ceased to exist through some disastrous effect of climate change for instance?  How would we all survive that? 

I trained in the semiconductor industry when the computer chips that run our modern world were very young.  For music I rode the wave of the vinyl LPs.  At home TV was only beginning to dominate family life.  Early clunky video tape recorders developed into Betamax and VHS machines - remember them?  Flat-screen TVs were just science-fiction.   These technologies now seem ephemeral, part of an eternal cycle.  After a few years they became part of history. And now it’s HD-DVD

But the web’s different.  Or is it?  In one of my roles I need to pursuade a group of older people to love the internet and hopefully find how much they could get out of social media and social networking tools.  But I get the distinct feeling they see the internet as yet another innovation which will run it’s course in a year or so.  They’ve seen it all before.  Are they right? 

Governments and multinational corporations have invested billions in underground optical fibre for the digital backbone.  They must have felt assured that their investment would be around for a while.  Presumably they don’t see it as part of a cycle but as something they can rely upon for the long run. 

Are they right?  Will it last? How resilient are all those underground fibres?  What will happen when sea levels rise, as surely they must?  Presumably someone’s made those calculations?