On 1/20/07, Brian Wallingford <brian@meganet.net> wrote:
That's news?
The same still happens with much land-based sonet, where "diverse paths" still share the same entrance to a given facility. Unless each end can negotiate cost sharing for diverse paths, or unless the owner of the fiber can cost justify the same, chances are you're not going to see the ideal.
Money will always speak louder than idealism.
Undersea paths complicate this even further.
Just the other night I was trolling marketing materials for various lit services from a number of providers and I ran across what I found to be an interesting PDF from the ol' SBC (can't find it at the moment). It was a government services product briefing and in it it detailed six levels of path diversity. These six levels ranged from "additional fiber on the same cable" to "redundant, diverse paths to redundant facility entrances into redundant wire centers". What struck me as interesting is that the government gets clearly definied levels of diversity for their services, but I've never run across anything similar in the commercial/enterprise/wholesale market. Are the Sprints/Verizons/ATTs/FLAGs/etc of the world clearly defining levels of diversity for their services to people?