I was once doing a review of an ISP's emergency response documentation, and it was 1 page. All stakeholders were to report to the primary datacenter and begin restoring services. It only really accounted for a single risk (Outage with no physical hardware failure) and didnt account for the scope and presence of their network. When I flagged it with them, they added a second section for cyberattack that was also loosely defined.
I really love the idea its the proposal itself I find odd. "Internety people" isnt really a well defined list of stakeholders. And I am struggling to figure out what outages could be handled by a group of undefined meshtastic users, especially with the overall tone that warfare might be involved.
Really the work of network resilience begins before the bombs drop. And its basic stuff. Keep everything patched. Keep your physical infrastructure secure. Ensure your data is safe, and you implement security best practices. And thats a list of things that largely we know that ISP's dont do.
Once thats done, every netadmin needs reliable OOB access to their networks. Now, OOB access might cease to function in this scenario. In which case, you are looking at ensuring that you have reliable physical access to your network. If you need cell service to communicate with your OOB solution, and it fails, dont also rely on cellular access to hands on techs. I dont know if Meshtastic is a useful solution here either, but having pre drilled emergency response plans so that qualified staff show up to the right locations for briefings/network access are crucial. Generators within reach of technicians, you might not be able to buy a generator during an incident. Console cables and tools already distributed.
Of course this all costs money.
Ultimately if you have no power, your peers dont have power, and theres an unspecified amount of physical damage (like a datacenter getting bombed) theres not going to be much you can do on a timescale that makes meshtastic make sense.
If anything theres probably some room for a government solution. Propose a hardened communications channel for private sector network engineers. Make sure that access to government infrastructure comes with a requirement that you actually patch and secure your network. Begin any large scale internet infrastructure collapse by getting a list of available engineers and resources and working out the compensation later.
I really love the idea its the proposal itself I find odd. "Internety people" isnt really a well defined list of stakeholders. And I am struggling to figure out what outages could be handled by a group of undefined meshtastic users, especially with the overall tone that warfare might be involved.
Really the work of network resilience begins before the bombs drop. And its basic stuff. Keep everything patched. Keep your physical infrastructure secure. Ensure your data is safe, and you implement security best practices. And thats a list of things that largely we know that ISP's dont do.
Once thats done, every netadmin needs reliable OOB access to their networks. Now, OOB access might cease to function in this scenario. In which case, you are looking at ensuring that you have reliable physical access to your network. If you need cell service to communicate with your OOB solution, and it fails, dont also rely on cellular access to hands on techs. I dont know if Meshtastic is a useful solution here either, but having pre drilled emergency response plans so that qualified staff show up to the right locations for briefings/network access are crucial. Generators within reach of technicians, you might not be able to buy a generator during an incident. Console cables and tools already distributed.
Of course this all costs money.
Ultimately if you have no power, your peers dont have power, and theres an unspecified amount of physical damage (like a datacenter getting bombed) theres not going to be much you can do on a timescale that makes meshtastic make sense.
If anything theres probably some room for a government solution. Propose a hardened communications channel for private sector network engineers. Make sure that access to government infrastructure comes with a requirement that you actually patch and secure your network. Begin any large scale internet infrastructure collapse by getting a list of available engineers and resources and working out the compensation later.