An ATCS like STARS needs to feed from multiple different OT and IT sources like radars, weather stations, other TRACONs, etc and is implemented in it's own airgapped environment.
It can get very pricy very quick. On top of that, the FAA's budget has been sclerotic for decades now after the 1980s era union action and the 1990s era national cost cutting.
And finally, it is a political organization, and NATCA is a fairly prominent union within the AFL-CIO, and could make the lives of NJ representatives hell for pushing reassignment out of Newark.
I would believe it was hard. And maybe it still is if you’re unwilling or unable to take advantage of modern technology.
Current low-cost equipment can easily send 10 or 100Gbps over long distance fiber links. Depending on how quickly you want to fail over when a link or an entire switch, router or rack fails, there are plenty of options that make various tradeoffs between failover latency and bandwidth, all the way up to completely duplicating all the traffic on redundant routes. I would bet that the entire aggregate traffic needed for air traffic control in a region is well under 10Gbps. And 10Gbps dedicated links or leases or (effective) purchases of dark fiber are not expensive on the scale of the FAA. Air traffic should use a network with a lot of redundancy, so maybe multiple those low costs by something like 5.
Heh, have fun hooking legacy systems to high speed networks without significant testing.
If seen plenty of old stuff crash because you'll have some ancient serial device with a limited buffer and someone jams a faster link in-between. All of a sudden you have a much larger amount of bandwidth delay product and the system doesn't handle a few megabytes of data getting lost on the line when it bursts for some unexpected reason. On the old fixed line that just couldn't happen.
An ATCS like STARS needs to feed from multiple different OT and IT sources like radars, weather stations, other TRACONs, etc and is implemented in it's own airgapped environment.
It can get very pricy very quick. On top of that, the FAA's budget has been sclerotic for decades now after the 1980s era union action and the 1990s era national cost cutting.
And finally, it is a political organization, and NATCA is a fairly prominent union within the AFL-CIO, and could make the lives of NJ representatives hell for pushing reassignment out of Newark.