| There is no excuse for a large player like GTE to lose power for any | extended period off time. (I can understand a brief, reboot long, outage | if something went awry, but hours? No sir.) Sure there is. It's called money. Enough of it can by enormous physical plant redundancy that this sort of thing would never happen, but then I imagine whoever invests that kind of money would want to recover costs plus a percentage, which will tend to push their prices upwards. People who expect prices to rise on the consumer front very soon in the U.S. and consumers to choose to spend more for their connectivity to a network with lots of diesel generators in bomb-proof buildings and the like are probably radicals who don't expect what price theory people call rational behaviour. Consequently, look carefully at anyone who starts investing huge sums of money into preventing against edge cases in the Internet like massive long-term utility interruptions. It may be smart engineering but I wouldn't want to invest in them. Moreover, I would begin wondering if the absence of a known set of potential failures was worth a large extra price to me as a consumer, when there are much more frequent known potential failures that the extra price wouldn't fix in the short run. However, note that there are companies who leverage _previous_ investments into such facilities into their Internet business. Such facilities almost always belong to or are leased by businesses involving per-minute charging with such huge gross per-minute revenues that most outages cost more than the fortunes required to prevent them. The Internet connectivity market has consistently demonstrated for some time now that there is no huge drop in revenues as a result of failures due to third parties that could only have been avoided by raising Internet connectivity prices substantially. Picking on BBN Planet (which is not yet fully GTEified, I mean, it hasn't been THAT long since they were acquired) because they were the victims of a weird accident that affected most of the rest of the city is economically irrational and also makes little engineering sense. Sean.