Figure 30:   Telephone wires and cable TV cables represent a single point of fail-ure in their networks.  Hurricanes and high winds can cause serious outages.

Some supporters of the telephone network say it offers 99.999% reliability or that it is down 5 minutes per year. That may be true of the switches in the Central Office, but is not true of the telephone network as a whole. The copper wires coming to the home or office, for example, represent a single point of failure (that is, there is no back-up if the wire or fiber optic cable breaks or is cut). Businesses using the telephone company should ask themselves two questions:


WiMAX service providers have no wires or cables that can be cut and can offer 99.999% of reliability by using redundant radios to cover a given market. Use of licensed spectrum ensures that only one service provider is broadcasting on a given frequency. Finally, ra-dios with high quality chips have a mean time between failure (MTBF) of 40 or more years. If nothing else, businesses should consider WiMAX as a cost effective disaster re-covery solution. Note: a backhoe operator cannot cut a WiMAX wireless connection to the home or office.

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