In a message written on Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 04:38:25PM +0200, Joel M Snyder wrote:
But... you can take this sort of 'single point of failure' argument almost as far as you want. In the security business (where I spend most of my time), I see people do this a lot--they get deep into the ultra-ultra-ultra marginal risk, which takes then an enormous amount of money to mitigate. It's an easy rat hole to explore, and often fun.
I agree worring about the cell site is not the worry. However I suspect many of the folks relying on SMS have no idea how it works inside the carrier. There are in fact other points of failure that may be much more "single point". For instance your SMS likely passes through a database in the carrier network (in case your phone is off). That's redundant, right? Fully RAID'ed and a hot standby spare and all that, after all it probably handles SMS's for a few million customers. Not always. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/