FRAGILE WORLD

Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 206/ 19/09/2011

I'm writing this column in the middle of a huge thunderstorm that possibly marks the end of our smashing Indian Summer in the Morra Valley (I know, sorry). Big storms in these mountains sometimes strike a substation and knock out our mains supply for half a day, but thankfully not this time - without electric power we have no water, which comes from a well via a fully-immersed demand pump. Lightning surges don't fry all the electrical goods in the house thanks to an efficient Siemens super-fast trip-switch, but years ago, before I had broadband, I lost a Thinkpad by leaving its modem plugged in. Lightning hit phone line, big mess, black scorchmarks all the way from the junction box...

Nowadays I have an OK mobile broadband deal from TIM (Telecom Italia Mobile), €24 per month for unlimited internet (plus a bunch of voice and texts I never use), which I don't have to pay when we're not here. It's fast enough to watch BBC live video streams and listen to Spotify, but sometimes it goes "No Service" for a few hours after a bad thunderstorm, as it has tonight. That gives me a sinking feeling in my stomach. I used to get that feeling at the start of every month, until I realised the €24 must be paid on the nail to keep service (and there's no error message that tells you so, just "No Service"). Now I know and I've set up with my Italian bank to top-up via their website - but if I leave it too late I have to try and do that via dial-up. Sinking feeling again.

Of course I use websites to deal with my UK bank, transfer funds to my Italian bank, pay my income tax and my VAT, book airline tickets and on-line check in. A very significant chunk of my life now depends upon having not merely an internet connection, but a broadband internet connection. And in London just as much as in the Umbro-Cortonese. I suspect I'm not alone in being in this condition of dependency. The massive popularity of tablets has seen lots of people using them in place of PCs, but of course an iPad is not much more than a fancy table mat without a 3G or Wi-Fi connection. But then, the internet isn't going to go away is it? Well, er, hopefully not.

After the torrid year of riots, market crashes, uprisings, earthquakes and tsunamis, and near-debt-defaults we've just had, who can say with the same certainty they had 10 years ago that every service we have now will always be available? The only time I ever detected fear in ex-premier Tony Blair's eyes was on the evening news during the 2000 petrol tanker drivers' strike, when it became clear we were just a day or so from finding empty shelves at the supermarket. In Alistair Darling's recent memoirs he comes clean that in 2008 - when he and Gordon were wrestling the financial crisis precipitated by the collapse of Lehman Brothers - it was at one point possible that the world's ATM machines could all go offline the next morning. Try to imagine it. It's not that all your money has gone away (yet), just that you can't get at it. How long would the queues be outside high-street branches, and how long would you be stuck in one? My bank repeatedly offers me a far better interest rate if I switch to an account that's only accessible via the internet, but much as it pains me I always refuse.

Now let's get really scary and start to talk about the Stuxnet Worm and nuclear power stations, Chinese state-sponsored hackers, WikiLeaks and Anonymous and phishing and phone hacking. Is it possible that we haven't thought through the wisdom of permitting our whole lives to become dependent upon networks that no-one can police, and none but a handful of engineers understand or repair? When a landslide blocked the pass between our house and Castiglion Fiorentino a few years back, some men with a bulldozer from the Commune came to clear it, but at a pinch everyone in the upper valley could have pitched in (they all have tractors). Not so with fixing the internet. I might know quite a lot about TCP/IP, but I know bugger-all about cable splicing or the signalling layers of ATM and Frame Relay, or DSLAMs.

What contributes most to the fragility of our brave new connected world though is lack of buffering. Just-in-time manufacturing and distribution mean that no large stocks are kept of most commodities, everyone assuming that there will always be a constant stream from the continuous production line, always a delivery tomorrow. It's efficient, but if it stops you end up with nothing very fast. Our water is like that: shut off mains power and two seconds later, dry. I could fix that by building a water-tank and have the pump keep it full, via a ballcock valve like a big lavatory cistern. Then I could buy a lot of solar panels and a windmill to keep the pump running (plus my laptop). I could even buy a little diesel generator and run it on sunflower oil. I'm not saying I will, but I won't rule it out quite yet...