![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/aad67dd16cdd598055e6f0c967311e69.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
It does not ease the situation WHEN your bits transit one provider's backbone (whom you chose to assure redundancy) does ultimately receive transit (at times such transit is not for long distances..) from a yet another whose infrastructure is now effected. I am not suggesting however, that is the case here.. AT&T is investigating. :)
Yeah, that's one reason why I stopped including the name of the carrier in most fiber cuts. It was getting too hard to tell who was who with all the swapping, leasing, sub-leasing, etc. Cable&Wireless is paying Level 3 $670 million for pieces of its fiber. GTE/BBN paid Qwest a ton for pieces of its fiber. AT&T, Sprint, MCI/Worldcom fiber overlaps so much its hard to tell them apart in some places. Qwest and IXC keep digging up other people's fiber, which would indicate their new fiber is being placed very close to other fiber. The non-facilities based carriers sometimes do better if they can guess which carriers have non-overlapping facilities, and buy from multiple physical facilities. But its not uncommon to see a dozen large ISPs have problems when someone trashes an interesting SONET ring somewhere, like Herndon/Mclean this morning. All the good right-of-ways are already taken. Heck, last year I was on some beautiful Caribbean islands with populations less than 100 people. We found both a backhoe and a cut telephone cable on them. In ten years (I ordered my first circuit in 1989), I've never gotten a good, coherent answer why any of my diversely, redundent circuits were both out-of-service at the same time due to the same event. Lots of credits, lots of apologies, but never a straight answer why something that should never happen, modulo the end of the world, happened. Good luck on AT&T's investigation.... -- Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO Affiliation given for identification not representation