Cables connecting phone, cable and Internet service come out of a wall connector in the home space exploration engineering office of Mike Loucks Thursday, March 26, 2015, in Friday Harbor, Wash., in the San Juan Islands. Loucks lost Internet and phone service during a 10-day outage on the island in 2013. Other regions around the country also have fallen dark in recent years, sometimes for days at a time, because of failures or accidents affecting the nation’s broadband infrastructure. The failures have revealed vulnerabilities in the backbone of the nation’s high-speed Internet highway, which often lacks the detour routes necessary to quickly restore service when outages occur outside of major cities. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson) 
Mike Loucks poses in his home space exploration engineering office, with a tangle of dedicated cables behind, Thursday, March 26, 2015, in Friday Harbor, Wash., in the San Juan Islands. Loucks lost Internet and phone service during a 10-day outage on the island in 2013. Other regions around the country also have fallen dark in recent years, sometimes for days at a time, because of failures or accidents affecting the nation’s broadband infrastructure. The failures have revealed vulnerabilities in the backbone of the nation’s high-speed Internet highway, which often lacks the detour routes necessary to quickly restore service when outages occur outside of major cities. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson) FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. (AP) – When vandals sliced a fiber-optic cable in the Arizona desert last month, they did more than time-warp thousands of people back to an era before computers, credit cards or even phones. They exposed a glaring vulnerability in the nation’s Internet infrastructure: no backup systems in many places.
Because Internet service is largely unregulated by the federal government and the states, decisions about network reliability are left to the service providers. Industry analysts say these companies generally do not build alternative routes, or redundancies, unless they believe it is worthwhile financially.
The result: While most major metropolitan areas in the U.S. have backup systems, some smaller cities and many rural areas do not.
“The more rural the location, the more likely that there’s only one road in and out of that location,” said Sean Donelan, a former infrastructure security manager in the U.S. Homeland Security Department who now works for a cybersecurity firm. “If someone manages to cut that fiber, you’ll generally see a one- or two- or three-day outage.”
Despite its own warnings about such vulnerabilities two decades ago, the federal government has taken no steps to require Internet companies to have backup systems, even as it has provided billions of dollars in subsidies to expand broadband Internet into unserved areas.