On Thu, 2005-04-14 at 16:15 -0400, Luke Youngblood wrote:
SONET simply means you are on a Sonet ring: Two redundant connections to the central office. If someone gets a little crazy with a backhoe your line is guaranteed to stay up (ask about SLAs, and make sure they will refund part of your monthly bill if you have an outage). That's why it costs over twice as much.
It is worth mentioning that the value of SONET redundancy has a lot to do with your location to the ring. SONET's value is proportional to the available space for backhoes between your location and the point where 1 trench splits into two trenches, if this ever occurs, prior to hitting the SONET ring. For instance: If you are more likely to experience digging near your location, then SONET may not really be worth the cost as nearby trenching activity could just as easily knock you off the ring. SONET is very good if you are worried about the provider's metro network confronting a backhoe. Does anyone have any good statistics on SONET outages? -Jim P.