Network reliability: the concurrent challenges of innovation, competition, and complexity

Abstract

While networks have become ubiquitous, fast, and cheap, the carriers and vendors face serious challenges in making networks more reliable and secure. Rapid technical evolution, market pressures, and complexity have contributed to large outages in both data and voice networks in the USA. The unreliable deployment and operation of otherwise fault-tolerant communication technologies and architectures are causing severe disruptions to thousands of users and enterprises. Network reliability growth is difficult in an environment that bundles rapidly emerging services and concentrates infrastructure to realize economies of scale.