3 secs

What would happen if there was no electricity in London for 3 seconds?

No grid supply, no backup generators, a complete black-out. What would happen if the unexpected black-out lasted 3 minutes, 3 hours or nobody knew when it would end? No TV or radio for information. No server farms to maintain internet connections. The tube would shut down. Passengers would be in the dark. People would panic thinking that it's another 7/7. The financial district that makes money on millisecond trades would go into panic and probably melt-down once systems are back up... Maybe some people would just chilax, enjoy the moment and go for a walk. People might switch off their iPods and talk more to each other.

We arrived in the mountains determined to have the internet as fast as possible. Never mind TV, it's boring. Switch off and log on! We need the internet. Within the day the internet company came to set it up. They threw cables over roofs and telephone lines to connect our half-built house to the nearest routing point 100 metres away.

In Bulgaria internet providers are mainly cable TV operators. And everybody has cable or satellite TV. Wooden shacks in the forest with broken windows and a half closing door have a dish outside.

Internet speeds in Bulgaria, even in the mountains, are faster than central London. In Sofia the capital you can reach 100Mbs compared to less than 4Mbs in London. Here in the mountains we're running on 10Mbs.

That is, if we have electricity.... We switched on the new modem, tried to log on but nothing happened. We quickly worked out that there was no electricity. At first we thought the mains switch from the old fuse box had jumped. Fuse boxes here looked like a crop of antique ceramic mushrooms. You could flog them off in Portobello Market as Victorian Arts & Crafts.

Our electricity comes from the neighbour’s house. But the neighbours told us that it was a power cut. And they happen nearly every day. Ouch! No electricity, no modem, no internet. Imagine London with daily power cuts. Not really!

Now we're looking for alternative methods to connect to the internet as well as back-up power supply.

Any suggestions are welcome!