Isn the Internet inherently unreliable and unstable? How could I possibly trust the Internet for important business activity?
The Internet is designed to continue to operate in the presence of failures of various kinds. This capability dates back to the original design goals of the earliest military packet switched networks, which were designed for data to flow around failures using redundancy in the network. Therefore, in a significant and important way, the Internet is more reliable than most other networks. In fact, the performance of the Internet during earthquakes and other natural disasters has led some researchers and public officials to examine new ways to use the Internet during times of disaster and widespread overloading of telephone networks. Many of the world’s largest financial institutions use Internet technology for their most important business activities. While this does not mean that one should bet one’s business on the performance of any single network service, the Internet is an important and essential part of many businesses’ complete strategy for telecommunications, product development,
