Now, if it was *your* router at the customer prem, then it would be your responsibility that you allowed your equipment to, uh, become waterlogged. ;-)
I don't know. One of the most frequent problem I see is power outages at the sites. I don't think any ISP can be responsible for things like that.
Fixable. UPS + AC/DC Power generators.
How about tornado nocking out much of a building including your CPE? How should such things be counted?
Um, you ought to know better than to put your damn equipment in a building that's going to get destroyed by a tornado, I guess. ;-) Seriously, though. "Acts of God" as they are called are typically not counted either. When it comes right down to it, if the customer no longer has a premise, then they are probably less worried about their equipment being up and operational. Technically, it only matters if you define your network as extending up to, and perhaps beyond CPE, or if it is just before CPE, or even futher, if it ends right at the Bell Demark at your POP. Since RTD purchases all the circuits for clients, our network (read, area of responsibility) includes everything up to the CPE, but not CPE itself. If there are circuit's down to individual clients as a result of Bell, we don't count it as downtime, even though it is logged and pursued as any other outage. As for connectivity to the rest of the 'net, it's *really* subjective. We sort of consider 50%+ of estimated Internet connectivity "up," even though we probably shouldn't. Internet connectivity uptime can be increased simply by adding more links to NSP's, so you can't just throw responsibility for that entirely onto your provider.
<this did actually happen, btw>
Why do I believe that? hehe. Dave -- Dave Siegel President, RTD Systems & Networking, Inc. (520)623-9663 Network Engineer -- Regional/National NSPs (Cisco) dsiegel@rtd.com User Tracking & Acctg -- "Written by an ISP, http://www.rtd.com/~dsiegel/ for an ISP."