On Sat, 30 September 2000, Vijay Gill wrote:

There are a lot more variants regarding the routing architecture (IGP setup, bgp setup, et al), and depending on various failure modes, some are better than others for a subset of failures and vice versa.

True, but in the end does it end up being a zero-sum game? Or are there real differences in performance? I'll pick on a couple of different providers, but we could use anyone. In my experience AT&T has a huge MTBF, over 7 years when I bought circuits. But when the two natural disasters struck at the same time, it would take AT&T several days to get the circuits working again. On the other hand, Sprint had a problem every month or two, but they usually had them fixed in about 20 minutes. What's the trade-off. Over 10 years, the availability numbers weren't that different between AT&T and Sprint. Sprint hypes their SONET fiber network, AT&T hypes their FASTAR network restoration. Is it strictly a question of cost? Although a lot of advertising and sales emphasis is placed on the technology, I haven't found the technical differences between providers affecting the delivered performance. Non-technical factors seem to have a bigger affect.