Subscribe#8: Wireless Cannot Really Achieve 5-9’s
This is a real hot button for me because the power grid isn’t even 5-9’s. There are a number of issues with this metric as follows:
- For it to be statistically relevant it must be evaluated over years not just weeks or months.
- Common sense should dictate that anything that is singular is susceptible to and in time likely to have some form of failure.
- Many wireless providers make 5-9’s claims but do not properly explain what it means clearly (i.e. at what distance, under what weather conditions, etc.) and as a result an expectation is created that cannot be met.
Think of this for a moment. If you were to encapsulate a strand of fiber cable under glass, light it up and watch it for 10 years, do you think the circuit would stay intact for all but 50 minutes in that time period? The answer is absolutely no. The Power system itself isn’t 5-9s so this can’t be true, unless there are back up systems, redundancies and a network to ensure that when something does go wrong the customer of the service is not impacted. And, in fact, if you recall the years that fiber optic cable was first deployed the arguments against it were that it was not reliable. If you evaluate Sprint as the pioneer in the Fiber Optics space, it was nothing short of a miracle when their first cross country all Fiber Optic call was made. Today Sprint and others have determined that they needed to build redundancy into the system to make it more reliable. And that is exactly the same thing that we do with our wireless networks. We build in redundancy. The application in this example is different but the principals remain the same.
The bottom line is that nothing in life is inherently 5-9’s and the key mechanism to achieving ultra high availability is proper planning, understanding the technology at hand and designing a system/network that has the best chance of performing with ultra high availability.
Tags: 5 9s, broadband wireless, fiber optic, five nines, gigabeam, metro ethernet networks, power grid, redundancy, reliability, Sprint, wireless