Computer Sweden (in Swedish) reveils the reason south of Sweden lost their infrastructure on Tuesday 7th of july 2007.
As triple play (TV/Radio, Internet and Telephony) service providers are gaining market shares all type of communication is transported in the same infrastructure. Swedes discovered what that means on Tuesday this week. A fiber cable was sabotaged in one of the junctions, meaning that large parts of southern Sweden lost their TV and Radio-signals as long with both Internet and Telephone infrastructure.
Normally a resiliance system should have covered this, but since Murphy's law still is something you need to take into consideration, because of maintenance this system failed.
The broken fiber cabel was fix after two hours. The cable was cut off by someone probably stealing copper cable and not a planned act of sabotage.
But this should be a wakeup call to Sweden and also the rest of the flat world we are currently living in. Security is to be taken seriuosly and it is a different game securing triple play networks than separate networks providing different services. An easy repair was possible because of the fact that the cable was cut off. What if the junction was blown away as a real act of sabotage. It would not have been up and running in two hours.
Triple play is the right way to go, it is just that we need too build it in a way that makes it as proof as possible. Just like VoIP, it will need to be implemented in a secure way, because it will not go away.