CAP Twelve Years Later: How the “Rules” Have Changed (2012)

I know this is the man who formulated the CAP Theorem to begin with, but I am shocked to hear him say "partitions are rare" without any justification. Could somebody please expound on this, as my bread&butter comes from building distributed databases, and I can assure you I encounter faulty networks all the time. Am I just crazy, or call me maybe?

I wonder what the author would think of this in light of FoundationDB and Google's F1 RDBMS.