10,500 Accounts Down - 8 Weeks To Fix

It was an AES-Intellinet issue. I'm trying to find some related articles about it now and we'll update.

AES-Intellinet is an alternative to telephone, cellular, or IP dialers. It uses spread spectrum, 450-470 Mhz radios, which act as a mesh. So if you have customers clustered in one area, they all act as transmitter and receiver, til the signal riches an uplink, which is usually IP to the central station.

That frequency is licensed in the United States, so nothing else should have been transmitting on it, but according the AES' investigation, a satellite malfunctioned and sent a packet which was received and rebroadcast by the network. Instead of ignoring it, essentially the radios just didn't know what to do with it, so they kept trying to rebroadcast it until they finally went down. 

SSI has a followup article with AES in which they talk about what happened/how they're preventing it from happening again, etc.

#1

"The french satellite did not have approval to use the frequency."

Well, the frequency seems to me (to what I have been reading) is free frequency to use for anyone, i.e. license to use this frequency are not required.

#2

I have been thinking about the "faulty packet", and personally i cannot find out how the "faulty packet" can enter one another "network" to be "rouge" packet that would put the "legal" network in faulty state.

What I can only think of, is simply "RF choke" of the central receiver, since this is listening on the frequency that the "rouge" french satellite transmitting on.

My personal conclusion

 Very good example on how manufactures think they can use free frequencies for implementing pretty serious applications without any drawbacks. The frequency is free to use for anyone, and anyone who will implement anything on these frequencies must be aware of the highly risk to have another applications on same frequency.

I personally know several cases when "the only legal" application is disturbed by a nearby hamradio repeater, who is transmitting 50 watt on near frequency and locking out AFSK/FSK receivers with totally lacking of any input filters. (of course, the "legal" application is the hamradio repeater and the ISM stuff, but there is absolutely nothing that can be said "I have priority of this frequency" - but the power of 50watt of registered repeater beats easily all other ISM stuff with lack of proper bandpass filter) 

As I said before, this is the price to pay to use free frequencies for pretty serious applications...