On Mon, 3 Nov 2003 12:13:45 -0500 "Deepak Jain" wrote:
Are you sure he wasn't talking about customer-buildings? I bet that 10% is to their COs and most of the 90% don't pay to have redundant paths to their building. If your business case is not sufficient for VZW or another company to build redundantly, they will build folded rings.
No, specifically he was talking about IOF (Inter-Office Facility). Best place to see this is Page 56-57, lines 56.12 through 57.17. Testimony of Mr. Albert, being cross examined by Nick Whichester of Mid-Maine: MR. ALBERT: 12 .... The interrogatory that was asked was of your fiber 13 systems, how many of them are configured completely with the 14 full fiber route in the survivable fashion. Our response to 15 that interrogatory is, of all our IOF system, 10 percent of 16 them are completely configured that way. The other 90 have 17 got some portion of overlap. 18 MR. WINCHESTER: Collapsed network, collapsed 19 ring? 20 MR. ALBERT: Some portion of the routing is a 21 collapsed ring. That might only just be a section. It 22 might only be, you know, 10,000 feet, but some portion of 23 them are collapsed rings. When you look at our maintenance 24 spare quantities for IOF, they are nowhere near, you know, 25 what you would need to throw every single working OC-48 that 1 we've got out there in the network. We've got 192 OC-48s in 2 Maine. There was one interrogatory we answered with the 3 snapshot count. With the quantities that we have, 4 maintenance spares for IOF, we still don't have the ability 5 when there is a failure to reroute on a fiber basis The upshot as I understand it is that Verizon in Maine responds to fiber cuts by a very manual process of finding the engineer responsible for the region, having an engineer go into the office, consult a number of paper maps and then figure out an alternate route. They then dispatch technicians to the various COes to string jumpers to route around the outage. This process is described in the testimony. The document makes fascinating reading and is available off the Maine PUC web site under the "transcripts" section (http://www.state.me.us/mpuc/misctranscripts/2002-243%20080503.htm). As I said before, I don't think Maine is unique to Verizon nor Verizon unique to RBOCs. I think the fact that some of you find the above information news is fascinating in and of itself... regards, fletcher