On Mon, 08 May 2000, Mohamed Hirse wrote:

A start would be if carriers architecture their network to be redundant and self healing.

Some do, compare Worldcom's reliability to Sprint's reliability. Of course, after the merger things may change (FUD, FUD, FUD). But even then you can have more outages than you can handle. For example, Cable&Wireless OPTUS network in Australia experienced dual fiber outages within a couple of hours bringing much of their network down. http://www.newsbytes.com/pubNews/00/148623.html The most reliable network I know about, FEDWIRE, only has 3-5 way diversity. How does the fed assure the carriers actually route the circuits they way they were ordered? I don't know.