Tommorrow's edition (Oct 19) of the Wall Street Journal has yet another article about Verizon's 140 West Street office. "Others say the extensive damage to Verizon's hub demonstrated that it is dangerous to rely on one company. They point out that only with the help of smaller competitors did parts of New York get their dial tones back. "We have buildings that would have been waiting for Verizon to get the service up if there were not alternatives," says Agostino Cangemi, the New York City commissioner in charge of telecom franchising One interesting thing I found during my research since September 11 is the Internet held up well because of its extensive use of alternate providers. Verizon tends to be very expensive, so ISPs needing lots of "cheap" bandwidth purchased service from a variety of competitors. Much of this was not planned, nor did ISPs have a clue where their circuits ran. It just happened due to Adam Smith's invisible hand. That's not to say CLECs didn't have problems. AT&T/TCG was walloped hard, and several ISPs have essentially abandoned some TCG facilities because they won't be repaired for a long time. MFN lost a huge amount of fiber. Worldcom won't say how bad MFS/Brooks/etc was hit but Worldcom customers report their circuits were out for 3-4 weeks and may not be repaired until the end of the year.