On 16/Jun/20 23:26, Owen DeLong wrote:
Count your blessings…
I know that we are lucky that in the markets we operate, local depots are available. There are other markets in Africa that may not be so lucky. If we ever built into those markets, we'd certainly cold spare as much as possible, as we used to in the current markets that the vendors didn't have local depots for 10 or so years ago.
As I said, YMMV, but I’m betting your vendor doesn’t stock a second copy of every piece of covered equipment in the local depot. They’re playing the statistical probabilities just like anyone else stocking their own spares pool. The biggest difference is that they’re spreading the risk across a (potentially) much wider sample size which may better normalize the numbers.
Yes, it's just like a bank - they hope not all customers come to withdraw all their cash on the same morning. We run a CRS 4-port 100Gbps line card that I know is not very popular among other operators in the markets where we have them. We had one fail in a smaller city a few weeks ago. We pay for NBD, not 24/7. A new line card arrived promptly, the morning after. I did hold my breath, but they managed. But yes, this is one of those things to seriously consider before you go standing up a network in a new market. Mark.