Keith Remadra, former chief advisor to the UNP Security Council on Clone affairs With the DDS embarking on some major infrastructure projects including their new GHQ and another major project i can't mention (it will be made public in a day or two anyway) i thought it might be interesting to compare the DDS who are willing and able to put their money and effort into maintaining vital infrastructure with the HCS who basically can't and won't.
The HCS Communications Network is in serious trouble. A major upgrade should have occurred over 10 years ago but for various reasons including severe economic difficulties and civil war the upgrade has not taken place. Now a network already creaking in the early 2100s is in serious danger of collapse. Now the HCS (and DDS for that matter) can utilise commercial network bandwidth in "emergency situations" (such as war or in the event of a major node failure). The Clones have been using between 30-40% of the Clone commercial network all the time for the last year now. Suffice to say the commercial broadcasters and indeed the public are not that happy about this.
The problem for the Clones is that they need to virtually start again with their network and as you can imagine the cost of this is vast. 32 billion zarks is a recent quote i have seen for a project that could last 15 years. That massive cost would have to come out of the already reduced HCS budget and they simply won't do it.
Instead the HCS have embarked on a series of smaller projects (known sarcastically in the Clone media as "sticking plaster projects"). 117 million zarks have been spent so far on a dozen small scale projects but they are just delaying the inevitable, a network crash could happen in a couple of years.
The Clones do know how serious the situation is, a more substantial project said to cost around 2.3 billion zarks is due to start next year to replace the backbone network between Cloneworld and 3 other core planets as well as parts of the main databus on Cloneworld itself. The Clones have also just signed a 157 million zark contract with a Terran company for improved data compression multiplexers and software.
These projects will just delay the inevitable though, and a war could cause an immediate collapse. The DDS completely replace their network every 10-12 years (the next cycle is due to begin in 2117) something the HCS should have done too. Of course this would mean less money for spaceships and other shiny toys.
But all these shiny toys are fairly useless without constant data...
