Who can forget that wonderful Friday this past July when the Rogers cellular and internet network went down. My sister was trying to get from Napanee to Moncton via Union Station then on to Pearson and couldn’t get in touch with my cousin with whom she was travelling. Jeannene is on Bell, Melanie was on Rogers. Jeannene set out very early by train to Toronto and wasn’t aware of the outage until she arrived in Toronto. Literally through the kindness of strangers, she was able to meet up with Melanie and get to New Brunswick.
There was no redundancy in the Rogers network. Subsequent investigation revealed that all of Roger’s communication networks went through one system. It goes down, the entire cellular and internet network goes down.
That day, Dana and I were doing some grocery shopping. Our local butcher couldn’t use their debit and credit payment system. Fortunately I had been to the bank the day before and had taken out some cash to have on hand, so we were able to pay for our goods.
There was no resiliency in the Rogers network. Why? As usual, dollars. Rogers says it’ll cost about $250 million to split the cellular and cable internet networks. Since most people bundle their services, if their cell phones went down, theoretically they could use their internet to communicate. But this wasn’t available for Rogers customers. People crowded into restaurants and cafes to get some WiFi.
Rogers will spend another $10 billion over the next three years on monitoring systems and other redundancies to make the service more robust.
There’s been a lot of talk about the cashless society. No hard currency, just virtual money. If we'd had virtual money the day the Rogers network went down, we wouldn't have been able to pay for our goods from the butcher. Most of the talking is done by financial institutions. Thar’s fees in them thar hills. Every time you use your debit or credit card, a financial institution takes a piece. Unfortunately for retailers, banks even charge for the use of cash, which should be illegal but isn’t.
Money doesn't get more virtual than crypto currencies. Consider the recent collapse of the FTX crypto currency exchange. Back in 2015, the founder of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, an MIT graduate, noticed that different countries valued the same crypto currencies differently.
For example, if Bitcoin was $16,000 in Japan but only $15,000 (equivalent in Japanese yen) in the USA, it’d make sense to buy a coin in the US and exchange it for one in Japan, pocketing the $1,000 difference.
Since Sam is a math brainiac, he thought setting up a crypto exchange would be a great idea. Then these kinds of trades could easily take place and he’d pocket fees for each transaction.
There’s a few problems with this. Crypto isn’t regulated. It’s the wild west. It’s not backed by any government or national domestic output. It’s in the ether.
Setting up a trading exchange in crypto isn’t regulated either. You can’t regulate an exchange for something that isn’t regulated.
However, Sam knew he needed money to make this happen, plus he needed people to invest in FTX to fund currency transactions. He was now in a very grey area in securities rules and regulations.
Early in November, with inflation rising and other crypto companies going under, there was a run on FTX. People wanted their money out of the company. The problem was, most of it was gone, estimated at $16 billion U.S. As the value of crypto crashed, so did the value of the holders of crypto tokens in FTX.
FTX went from a darling of crypto last summer to disaster today.
If people had stuffed cash in their sofa, they’d have been better off. Likely, anyone who invested in FTX will not see anything from their ‘investment’.
It’s reported that some people put their entire savings into FTX. All the parental homilies come out now, such as, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” But it’s true. There’s no resilience in putting everything into crypto or any single investment for that matter.
During the recent storms affecting the U.S. south east and Canadian east coast, the power went off. What vehicles were still going? Electric vehicles. When gas stations don’t have power, they can’t pump gas. Most electric vehicles can run for about a week with short commutes or runs to the grocery store. There’s resilience in electric vehicles.
Where else can you find resilience? If the subway stops running, people can jump on bicycles using bike share access.
My point of all of this is, how resilient is your life? What happens if the power goes out? Can you run your furnace or boiler? Can you heat your home? Do you have enough water to drink or flush toilets? Can you charge your cell phone?
These things don’t cost a lot of money. Sign up for a bike sharing system even if you don’t think you’ll use it immediately. Grab a couple of 4L bottles of water at the grocery store next time you shop in case your tap temporarily runs dry.
I’m not going to be digging an underground vault any time soon. These are not end-of-days. But there are many things nibbling around the edges of our lives that require us to be more self-reliant. Rogers goes down again. What will you do? The store can’t take debit. Can you pay cash? If the power goes out, can you drive your vehicle?
One simple thing that everyone can do is keep at least a half a tank of fuel in your vehicle in the winter months. That way, you can almost always get to where you need without filling up if the gas stations are closed. And in the summer, if you can’t drive, you can use that bike share account you already have.
We recently had a six hour power outage. We got our fireplaces going and we were quite comfortable.
This concludes the Dad sermon.
Christmas is coming.
