If It's Smart, It's Vulnerable

What If the Network Goes Down?

It's amazing how well the Internet works. It can't handle everything, though. Reliability is becoming ever more important as the Internet is becoming part of our critical infrastructure.

Electrical Networks

Some inventions are so good that they change the world. When a new innovation is useful enough, we no longer want to live without it—and once a technology is practical enough, it soon becomes compulsory.

Electrical networks are a good example of this. While it is hard to imagine modern life without electricity, electrical networks are a fairly recent invention. The first city-wide networks were commissioned in the 1870s, after which electricity soon became commonplace. It was first used for street lighting and factories, but rapidly found its way into urban homes.

Although cities were quickly covered by networks, it took decades to electrify outlying regions. India welcomed its last unconnected villages to the electricity grid in 2018.

Nowadays, a power outage brings everything to a halt. If an outage is extensive, not only are homes affected—shops and factories also close. Very few organizations are equipped to ensure continued operation during an extended outage. Only hospitals, data centers, and military installations have generators and diesel tanks that provide power for long periods.

Of course, battery-operated devices work during outages. Even mobile phones work, but not for long—your phone may be fully charged, but the backup power ...