----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Sinatra" <michael@rancid.berkeley.edu>
UC Berkeley installed 3 CEVs (Controlled Environment Vaults) below ground on campus about 10-15 years ago. One of them houses one of the two main fiber penetrations to campus, including DWDM gear, patch-panels, border routers, even packetshapers (back when those were relevant in a large EDU environment), servers, WiFi portals, etc. This stuff has all been in place for at least 10 years and has worked really well, modulo the caveats below. Two of the vaults have 6-7 19" telco racks, and one (the one with the big fiber entrance) also has a 23" rack in addition to the others.
Caveats:
[ 17 pages of caveats elided ] So, the elephant in the room at this stage of the thing is this: Why don't you just *put this stuff in a building*, and, y'know, never demolish it? Yes, you'll probably have to build it to CO grade standards, but that isn't exactly rocket surgery, and it seems to me that you peel 3 or 4 layers of crap off the top doing it that way. Unless you're in, say, the Philippines, I can't see the advantage of burying all that stuff underground on a campus-scale deployment. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA #natog +1 727 647 1274