True, there have been cases when the worldcom circuits in a city have been cut, but the UUNET network stayed up. Which undercuts any salespeople who tell people "trust us with your entire network." Nevertheless, it is amusing when an official Worldcom spokesperson specifically identifies a fiber cut in Worldcom's facilities, yet one of Worldcom's subsidiaries refers to its parent company as a nameless telco provider. It almost sounds like finger-pointing instead of synergy. But anyone who has ever dealt with the Worldcom family of companies is probably used to it. When there is a problem, its not a Worldcom circuit, its a MFS circuit. It seems very different at some other companies. I suspect some folks want to disown parts of TCG's network, but AT&T puts their brand name on the line when AT&T Local Services has a problem instead of refering to a nameless telco provider. On Fri, 31 March 2000, Vijay Gill wrote:

...

UUnet allegedly wrote

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Senior network engineers are working closely with one of our Telco providers to quickly resolve

Amazing how quickly in the event of a fault one's much vaunted parent company becomes 'one of our Telco providers' :-) (no UUnet is not the only offender).

There is not necessarily a one to one mapping between circuits purchased by UUNET and circuits sold to UUNET by WCOM.