Null references (oh no, not again!)

[Georg Wrede]

Sean Kelly wrote:
> At Newark Airport in New Jersey, the Air Control Tower's network is 
> linked to radar and such via redundant cables, as expected.  However, 
> these cables are run right next to one another, eliminating any benefit 
> that the redundancy might provide.  Funny how things change between the 
> design requirements and implementation.

We had a major phone outage in Finland about ten years ago. Everything 
except the capital metro area. All national operators, both land lines 
and cellular, even the military.

One single fiber bunch ten miles north of Helsinki, next to a railroad 
track. A train car derailed, broke a pylon, and the cables were severed 
in the ground.

I couldn't ever have imagined that cellular tower cables are dug with 
land line trunk cables. Such a thought would never even have occurred to 
me. One of the biggest points of having a cell phone at the time was to 
have a separate system.