By Phil Spalding

cambolc.co.uk,  LinkedIn, BlueSky, Facebook,

Well it happened again! The mobile network Vodafone experienced a prolonged outage of 5G services. The 2G and SMS network were still available. The solution may be to move away from the cloud for all but essential services such as Dropbox and have a desktop environment. With the move by Microsoft and to a certain extent Google to have everybody working off the cloud this is potentially a problem for business continuity.

The latest Raspberry Pi 5 Plus (above) is a solution utilising a Linux (Raspbian) desktop that is affordable, see The Pi Hut website. It is a solution that could easily include a local server. The storage space is 256 GB of SSD. Possibly more than equal to the internet going down.

The Government response so far has to be to recommend that companies keep paper copies of critical business continuity plans. This also means that they might need to invest in filing cabinets and staff to fill those cyber proof storage. Personnel could be drawn from the NEETS (Not in Education, Employment or Training) generation. Even people transitioning from one industry sector to another could be a pool of expertise that has maybe not been considered not been considered. The local DWP office in Haverhill is running a scheme whereby people on Universal Credit can transition to new sectors by having work experience. I learnt about this at one of The Epicentre in Haverhill’s Business networking events. The Qualifications and Credit Framework could be a guide for employers when selecting transferable skills taught as the core for each Level of qualification.

Vodafone’s problem are not the first time we have experienced a network problem. Here is a blog I wrote recording such an event back in 2016 the day the internet went dark.