The telecom infrastructure is actually somewhat brittle. I took a course in internet economics through UC Santa Cruz Extension many years back, taught by a guy with some pretty interesting friends. To demonstrate the how fragile the internet actually was, he described an aging bridge across the Missouri River whose supports carried both the Sprint and AT&T's fiber for the internet. If that bridge had come down we would have effectively had no internet for while. At the time I was commuting to work on CalTrain and every morning, just north of the Chronicle printing plant, we went through a tunnel with two conduits, one labeled "Sprint", one labeled "AT&T". I took a picture of them with the camera on my cell phone and showed it to him. He just about fell down laughing. He described to the class the activities going on in a certain building on Spear Street in San Francisco that were being performed by people in Maryland he was consulting for (I think this may have violated his ND). Regarding my 1.3 megapixel image he said "Now you all know how easy it would be to take down San Francisco."
Currently I have a team lead who worked for 40 years or so for AZ telcos from Mountain Bell through Quest. He remembers when the copper that served all of South AZ at the time, also out of Phoenix Main, was backhoed during a construction project. Some highly placed people lost their jobs over that one. Wonder whose heads will roll over this?
