Just got back from the NetEvents forum on networks and communications at Evian, France, where the network went down for the final day. Seems it was something to do with the service-provider and the massed ranks of experts could do nothing about it. As a result you'll have to wait until Monday for some of my reports.

Some kind of gremlin seems to be at work at PCW Towers, too. I've just loaded a story about web sites going down, only to find that our own site is throwing up old news and not allowing me in to put the latest up.

Recent hiccups in my Virgin Media (ex NTL Telewest ) broadband service had already got me thinking about net resilience and if I were running a small web-dependent business I would be sure to have some kind of fallback, however apparently watertight my service level agreement. It costs relatively little to have both an ADSL link and cable in areas where both are available.

Some businesses take their link for granted until it goes down. A friend of mine, who runs a news agency serving all major news outlets in the Middle East, found himself cut off for days when his ADSL crashed. He had no fallback and no business-class service level agreement, having never been told he needed one; BT appeared oblivious to the damage the disruption would cause to its reputation in a major market.

This is not just a problem for businesses. Many people work from home at least part of the week and only realise how much they depend on the web when it goes down.

Dean Bubley, founder of Disruptive Analysis, suggested at the NetEvents Forum  this week that this could be where emerging technologies like Wimax could be heading: providing a fallback link for people or businesses. It makes a lot of sense.