Offline
Image by Jean Martinelle from Pixabay
Last Tuesday, I had five consecutive Teams meetings booked. I landed with the early morning flight, and connected to the first meeting while in the car on the way to my ordinary office around 30 minutes from the airport. My plan was to transfer the call to my workstation upon arrival. Instead, as I parked my car, I got disconnected. Before long, I realized that I had no reception on my phone. Unfortunately, my office isn’t connected to fibre, and thus I am running a 5G broadband service. The problem is that when the phone tower dies, I am completely cut off from the world.
I couldn’t even cancel or move my booked meetings. That is a bit embarrassing. You invite a bunch of people to a call and then you – the organizer – ghosts them. My gut feeling told me that it was best to jump back into the car and drive towards the city. It seemed to be a local problem with only my tower. It turned out to be a major mobile net disruption. I had to drive for 20 minutes before I got enough reception to do anything. Apparently, there was some major cable that had been broken. Luckily, I have another office location with wired internet. I drove there as quickly as possible and stayed there for the rest of the day until I got a message from my wife that Telia had solved the issue.
However, the next day it started all over again. Early in the morning, all our phones and mobile internet died without warning. I could just barely reach the next tower to get enough speed (like 5 Mbit download and 0,2 upload) to read the press message. Another 24 hours of offline was the verdict. This is not good. Two days in a row without connection to the outside world. In circumstances outside of work, it can probably be a very nice thing. But when you are in the middle of several important project milestones and deliveries, internet failure can be catastrophic. This was rather stressful, in combination with all of my pre-booked meetings.
It took two full days before returning to a somewhat normal state of operations, Tuesday and Wednesday. And after that it worked… until yesterday! Then I lost connection again. However, luck favours the prepared. I had just installed a 2nd sim card from Tele2 in my dual sim 5G modem. This very nice router/modem even has load balancing and failover features. This means that I can create rules to automatically switch between Telia and Tele2 in case of glitches. But this third internet failure was effortless. One mouse click, and I enabled Tele2 instead of Telia and suddenly everything works. Mission critical systems require redundancy, and this is a great example of why. Everything is in the cloud nowadays. Without internet connection, it becomes near impossible to do any work. Especially when you cannot connect to the file server.
The moral of this story is that preparation is key. It might sound desperate to have a dual internet connection, but once you have tasted the real-world consequences of a major disconnect, the invoice and fee is but a drop in the ocean. Certain things cannot be allowed to fail in any way. Now, with both Telia and Tele 2 connections, it seems far-fetched that both of them snould fail simultaneously. So not much more can be done on that front.
One thing I have been thinking about is to setup a local mirror of the company file server. It is not a question of “if” but a question of “when” we will lose connection to our precious file server next time. If I could manage to setup a computer to mirror a network share, that could be rather useful. That sounds like an interesting and fun project too. But anyways, luck favours the prepared. I am a chronic pessimist, which means I like to prepare a lot.