Building Resilient Communication Networks

95% of the world’s internet traffic moves through subsea cables. Not satellites. Not clouds. Just glass. Laid on ocean floors. Invisible. Critical. Exposed. This year, four major cables in the Red Sea were cut... ...and Asia-Europe lost 25% of bandwidth. And no, it wasn’t an war. Just anchors. Fishing nets. Seabed tectonics. If your DR plan doesn’t include the ocean floor... ...you’re not ready. Here’s how to build real resilience... ...with SubCom as your on-ground truthful partner: ✧ MAP Trace your traffic flows. Which systems carry your core paths? SEA-ME-WE 6? AAE-1? EIG? Tag landing stations, handoffs, terrestrial hops. Now mirror that in your L3 overlays using SubCom’s telemetry. ✧ SPLIT Don’t load balance across two POPs… ...that land on the same cable. Use SubCom’s open cable design to mix routes, geographies, and owners. Redundancy ≠ resilience unless it spans tectonic and political zones. ✧ DESIGN SubCom supports wavelength-level reroute. Define fault domains. Automate handoff to your SD-WAN controller. No more manual ticket escalations at 2 AM. ✧ SIMULATE Run Red Team drills for dual cable cuts. Measure time-to-recovery. Not hope. Coordinate with SubCom’s NOC before the anchor drops. ✧ MONITOR SubCom gives you real-time fault zones, vessel paths, route degradation. Pipe it into your NOC. Pair it with your IXP metrics. Predict the cut before the outage. We stress over power and cooling redundancy in data centers. But one snapped fibre under water can drop an entire region. At 400G, there’s no retry logic. There’s signal. Or outage. Design accordingly. What’s your failover plan if the ocean goes dark? Tag your network team, this is the layer nobody’s watching.

Outages should be viewed as indicators of stress within a business model rather than simple glitches. Recent incidents, such as the Amazon Web Services (AWS) DNS failure and Vodafone’s UK outage, highlight a critical issue: many so-called "resilient" architectures may actually function as single points of failure, despite appearing to have multi-cloud alternatives. If an Industry 4.0 operation relies on only one cloud region, DNS path, or vendor control plane, true resilience is lacking, and reliance on fortunate circumstances may be the case. Addressing this requires a shift towards designing systems that anticipate failure. Strategies may include prioritizing local-edge operation technology (OT) to maintain essential functions, employing active-active configurations across multiple regions and providers, ensuring diverse peering and identity paths, utilizing dual-carrier connectivity, and implementing private 5G networks for reliable control. Regulatory bodies such as DORA, NIS2, and UK Operational Resilience will likely seek concrete evidence of resilience rather than presentations. While achieving true resilience involves costs, it is important to consider that unplanned downtime can result in significant financial losses and damage customer trust. Recommended practices include conducting regular “Failure Day” exercises, mapping third-party dependencies down to the API level, and revising key performance indicators (KPIs) from uptime to fault tolerance. This approach can help ensure that, in the event of disruptions in systems like us-east-1, operational capabilities remain intact and financial performance is protected. At #BellLabsConsulting we have a full methodology to prevent events such as these, but also have a faster response when they happen.

The recent Verizon outage was a reminder of something most of us in operations and emergency management already know but don’t always prioritize: commercial networks are not guaranteed. When a major carrier goes down, even briefly, it disrupts more than convenience. It affects coordination, dispatch, logistics, field reporting, and executive decision making. For organizations that depend on real time communication, that kind of fragility should prompt serious reflection. One option worth more discussion in the civilian space is the use of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) as part of an out-of-band communications strategy. MANETs don’t rely on fixed infrastructure. Devices form a self-organizing mesh where each node can relay traffic. If one node drops, the network reroutes. That architecture was originally developed for austere and tactical environments, but the same principles apply in disaster response, large scale events, or infrastructure failures. This isn’t about replacing commercial telecom. It’s about resilience. A layered communications model: primary carrier, secondary carrier, and a deployable mesh capability gives organizations optionality when conditions degrade. Utilities, hospitals, municipalities, and large enterprises all run continuity exercises. The question is whether communications redundancy is being treated as seriously as power redundancy or data backups. Outages will happen. The real issue is whether we design around that reality. Curious how others are thinking about out-of-band communications in their continuity planning. #communication #leadership #cybersecurity

🚨 Closing the Gap: Strengthening ICT Resilience 💪🏽 When ISO/IEC 27031:2025 was published, it caught my attention immediately. While ISO/IEC 27001 and ISO 22301 provide strong foundations in information security and business continuity, they treat ICT as a supporting player, not the lead. Yes, I know ISO/IEC 27031 isn’t a certifiable standard. My posts are about creating robust resilience frameworks that extend beyond achieving certification as a company. This is where ISO/IEC 27031 can be used as a supplemental guideline to create additional company controls to mature/improve resiliency. In today’s reality, ICT is the backbone. If it fails, everything else follows. That’s why I’ve moved quickly to integrate new ICT-specific controls into the framework my team has developed. Why? 1️⃣ Bridge the gap between security, continuity, and ICT readiness. 2️⃣ Reduce recovery times and data loss after incidents. 3️⃣ Align with global best practices and demonstrate resilience maturity. How? Here’s what you should consider implementing: ✅ Set precision recovery targets: Establish ICT-specific Minimum Business Continuity Objectives (MBCO), Recovery Time Objectives (RTO), and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) for every critical service. ✅ Map the entire digital backbone: Document end-to-end system dependencies, data flows, and architecture to prioritize recovery where it matters most. ✅ Plan for the unthinkable: Build ICT-specific disruption scenarios into our enterprise risk models, from ransomware to cross-region outages. ✅ Know exactly when to act: Define explicit triggers for activating ICT continuity plans and integrating them into enterprise incident response. ✅ Engineer resilience into the core: Require tested redundancy strategies for infrastructure, applications, and data layers. ✅ Prove it in the field: Expand exercise programs to validate full ICT restoration capabilities under realistic, high-pressure scenarios. ✅ Put vendors on the hook: Hold critical third parties to contractual recovery SLAs, with testing and performance reporting. ✅ Track readiness like a KPI: Measure ICT resilience through dedicated metrics, scorecards, and internal audits to ensure continual improvement. 🤌🏽 The result: The framework my team has developed now forms a three-standard powerhouse, ISO/IEC 27001 + ISO 22301 + ISO/IEC 27031, that strengthens our ability to operate through anything, from cyberattacks to data center failures. 🤪 (Don’t worry, we’ve included NIST to develop our framework as well) 📘 Next step: I’ll continue to share lessons learned with the broader resilience community and encourage adoption across industries as we continue to implement any changes. #ISO27031 #ResilienceByDesign #ICTResilience #BusinessContinuity #CyberResilience #ComplianceCulture #RiskManagement #ISO27001 #ISO22301 #Resilience #ProgramArchitecture #BCDR

I’ve been curious about Silvus Technologies for a long time — well before Motorola Solutions brought them into the MSI family in 2025. Lately I’ve been digging in deeper, properly geeking out on how powerful this communications backbone really is. What stands out most isn’t only military use. It’s how resilient, self-forming, self-healing mesh networking unlocks entirely new possibilities for public safety agencies. Carrier dependence introduces fragility. Fixed infrastructure introduces delay. Silvus flips both on their head. The network moves with the mission, adapts in real time, and keeps voice, video, and data flowing even when environments turn hostile or unpredictable. For law enforcement, fire, EMS, and emergency management, this kind of backbone becomes a force multiplier. Tactical operations, disaster response, large-scale events, unmanned systems, temporary command posts — all benefit from reliable connectivity without towers, trucks, or waiting on coverage maps. Motorola Solutions does far more than radios. Adding Silvus strengthens a broader vision focused on resilient ecosystems where people, devices, video, and data stay connected when stakes rise. If communications resilience matters to you, this article is worth your time.

The internet wobbled today. A DNS issue in a single AWS region cascaded across otherwise “safe” regions and availability zones. This was not just another regional outage. It was a practical lesson in the cloud's hidden, centralized dependencies. We build for multi-region resilience, but we are often betrayed by "global" services that are not as distributed as they appear. The gap between perceived autonomy and actual entanglement is where resilience fails. My lessons learned from today’s AWS outage: 1. The Control Plane Chokepoint AWS separates data planes (serving traffic) from control planes (the APIs managing resources). Many global control planes live in one region, often us-esst-1. When that hub is impaired, your automation fails. You cannot scale, deploy, or modify resources, even in perfectly healthy regions. 2. The Hidden Dependency Chain The obvious risk is your application failing. The hidden risk is the failure of a core service you do not directly use. Today’s DNS and networking issue rhymes with the 2020 Kinesis outage. A foundational service failed, and higher level systems like Cognito, Lambda, and Auto Scaling began to error simply because they relied on it internally. 3. The Myth of the "Island" Application Even a perfect multi-AZ application is not an island. It must resolve DNS, fetch IAM tokens, pull container images, and push logs. These core functions often rely on shared, centralized services. When those services choke, your redundant application times out. History provides a classic intelligence analog. During WWII, Allied planners knew German communications were heavily encrypted. But they also knew most signals could only transit a few central relay stations. By targeting those nodes, they could blind the entire network without breaking a single code. The cloud's core services are these modern relay stations. We are not just choosing between regional availability and multi-region reliability. We are choosing between apparent distribution and actual fault isolation. The core principle is to understand your actual blast radius. A system is only as resilient as its most critical, least visible dependency. Today is a reminder that resilience is not an architectural diagram. It is the verified, tested ability to withstand the failure of a dependency you probably forgot you had.

Picture a cell tower that takes to the sky when the ground route is blocked. We sit with Chris, senior disaster recovery manager at T-Mobile For Business to unpack how a tethered drone becomes a flying cell site—rising to 400 feet, running 24/7, and restoring coverage where trucks can’t reach. From islands off Puerto Rico to rugged stretches near Hawaii, this portable system can ride on a boat or UTV, spin up quickly, and hold the network steady until permanent infrastructure is back online. Chris explains how these aerial nodes slot into a broader disaster toolkit alongside SATCOLTs, vehicles, and generators, delivering continuity when storms, hurricanes, or wildfires hit. We get into the details that matter under pressure: endurance measured in weeks, nationwide staging for rapid activation, and the ability to prioritize connectivity for public safety using network slicing. That means police, firefighters, EMS, and emergency managers get dependable voice, data, and video when they need it most, while communities regain the lifeline of reliable communication. Security and safety anchor the entire approach. With encryption, strict procedures, and controlled altitude, the team keeps operations safe over complex disaster zones. And there’s more on the horizon—bigger airframes, advanced capabilities, and innovations designed to make resilient coverage faster to deploy and easier to maintain. If you care about disaster readiness, emergency communications, and the future of portable 5G, this conversation shows how resilient networks take flight—and why that matters for every community. #GartnerSYM T-Mobile for Business Partner at Innovate25

🚀 Pushing the Edge of What’s Possible in LEO Data Transmission This week I shared a new podcast episode where we dove into one of my favorite topics: how we build resilient, space‑based communications systems that can actually adapt at the tactical edge. We covered everything from the rise of #NTN technologies to how commercial space is reshaping modern defense. But afterward, one question kept coming up: 👉 “So… what are you building next?” Here’s the answer. Right now, the team at Fairwinds Technologies is advancing our testbeds for strategic and tactical data networks and RF testing. Using our in‑house–developed Quad Channel RF Emulator, we’re creating a system that can accurately recreate LEO Satellite Channels and network data environments—allowing us to test, validate, and accelerate mission‑critical comms with real‑world fidelity. And it’s about much more than checking waveforms. It enables: 🔹 Faster iteration for next‑gen ISR and edge‑compute solutions 🔹 Realistic, space‑like conditions without waiting for on‑orbit access 🔹 Automated validation pipelines that shorten concept‑to‑field timelines 🔹 Reliable, mission‑ready performance for operators who depend on it Space systems are evolving quickly—and how we test and harden them has to keep pace. I’m excited to be part of that push forward. Podcast links are in the comments if you’d like to dive deeper 🎙️ Always open to connecting with others working in comms, ISR, alt‑PNT, or automated testing ecosystems and we are currently hiring for multiple engineering positions in this space. Fairwinds.Tech Onward. 🚀 #DoD #DoW #USAF #USSF #USMC #Army #Navy #C5ISR #C4ISR Brian Dempsey Glenn Link Matthew Jones Joe Ruhl

From Fragile to Adaptive: The Evolution of Wireless Resilience The history of wireless communication reveals a continuous progression from fragile single-antenna links to highly adaptive, resilient systems. Early Single Input Single Output (SISO) designs, using one transmit antenna and one receive antenna, lacked mechanisms to overcome fading and interference, leading to frequent link failures. Reliability improved through successive channel coding breakthroughs, starting with convolutional codes, followed by turbo codes, and later Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) codes and polar codes, which are used in modern standards. The most transformative shift, however, occurred with multiple antennas. Multiple Input Single Output (MISO) systems, which employ multiple transmit antennas and a single receive antenna, enabled transmit diversity and spatial redundancy. Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) systems, using multiple antennas at both the transmitter and receiver, allowed capacity scaling and spatial multiplexing under rich scattering conditions. Alongside these advances, higher-order modulation schemes such as Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) and Adaptive Modulation and Coding (AMC) enabled systems to dynamically trade throughput for reliability based on channel conditions. Beamforming, which applies phase and amplitude weights across antenna arrays to focus transmitted energy, further enhanced performance by improving signal quality and reducing interference. By Long Term Evolution (LTE), these components were tightly integrated into a closed-loop system operating at millisecond timescales, and Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) followed a parallel evolution. In Fifth Generation New Radio (5G NR), adaptation became central through massive MIMO, flexible numerology, and continuous beam management. The result is a wireless ecosystem that survives not because the channel became easier, but because the technology learned to adapt at the timescale of the channel. The attached (brief) article attempts to present the historical evolution using a timeline based narrative.