Actually, most of the largest holders of fiber in the U.S. have started to offer unprotected SONET (and Lambda) service. Apparently, a few months ago OC-48 and OC-192 speed Unprotected Wavelength services caught on like wildfire, and customers started clamoring for lower speed Unprotected SONET service. I know of at least six of the biggest carriers here who offer it at OC-12, and every one willing to guarantee a particular path - you just have to work path diversity into your design. Some may even offer OC-3, though I haven't checked that. I can say that the price point on Unprotected SONET services is great - if you're building redundancy into your physical topology anyway, you may not need APS. The savings can be huge. Likewise, I agree that there can be great cost savings for "Preemptable" service, though I wouldn't use it for a mission-critical network. I only know offhand of one major U.S. carrier who offers this, but I'm sure others do, or will - it just makes sense. There are plenty of services that can stand an occasional outage. - Jeb
-----Original Message----- From: Glen Turner
<snip> What you can't buy is two unprotected diversely-routed circuits. You can simulate that by purchasing a protected circuit with a single customer interface and an extra traffic channel.
<snip> -- Glen Turner Network Engineer (08) 8303 3936 Australian Academic and Research Network glen.turner@aarnet.edu.au http://www.aarnet.edu.au/ -- The revolution will not be televised, it will be digitised