On Wed, 26 July 2000, Steve Meuse wrote:

At 07:10 AM 07/26/2000 -0400, William Allen Simpson wrote:

...

My opinion (based on a fair number of years of experience) is that any ISP foolish enough to have bought APS should also ask proof that no other circuit is provisioned for the same APS. Once you've done that, a class action might be in order....

This isn't an issue, when you own the transmission gear (like many NSPs do).

This *is* an issue even when you own the transmission gear. Diversity doesn't happen by magic. You must do the hard work and then audit the work. Unfortunately the carrier outage reports are full of circuit provisioning errors on the carriers *internal* circuits which later resulted in a loss of service due to a lack of recovery path. Owning your transmission doesn't mean its configured correctly nor does it make you infallible. Large NSPs have the problem of being large, and they don't always know what all the different parts of the same company is doing. It may seem like redudent work to audit what your own transmission people did. But if the transmission group can't provide paying customers with the diversity they ordered, what makes you think they provide any better service to an internal, usually funny-money, circuit. Whether you are ordering circuits from a different carrier or from your internal transmission group, if you haven't done an audit, you really don't know what you have.