From where i'm sitting, I see a number of potentially dangerous trends that could result in some quite catastrophic failures of networks. No, i'm not predicting that the internet will end in 8^H7 days or anything like that. I think the Level3 outage as seen from the outside is a clear case that single providers will continue to have their own network failures for time to come. (I just hope daily it's not my employers network ;-) )

I don't agree with this 'the sky is falling' perspective and we've seen these discussions over and over. Survivability was and continues to be a design goal of anything we do here. Was from the first days and it's true to this day. When you implement a critical service, you need to do due diligence on whether the path chosen meets the needs.

Now the question of Emergency Services is being posed here but also in parallel by a number of other people at the FCC. We've seen the E911 recommendation come out regarding VoIP calls. How long until a simple power failure results in the inability to place calls?

There are specific requirements (read: gov't regulations) to implement E911 with a number of redundancy options, typicalling calling for things like triple path redundancy. While I have worked on E911 infrastructure in the past and I'm not aware of an exhaustive analysis for E911 over IP, I don't see a reason off the top of my head why you can't do the same thing on IP. Sure, requires careful planning. But what critical service doesn't? What are you asking for? More gov't regulation?

While my friends that are local VFD do still have the traditional pager service with towers, etc... how long until the T1's that are used for dial-in or speaking to the towers are moved to some sort of IP based system? The global economy seems to be going this direction with varying degrees of caution.

I'm concerned, but not worried.. the network will survive..

What's your point then? :) There's no panacea for poor implementation. That's why knowledge and experience is important in network design and it's importance is directly linked to the definined critical need of the service implemented. Sorry, just angst for me here. No visible life. Thanks Christian ***** "The information transmitted is intended only for the person or entity to which it is addressed and may contain confidential, proprietary, and/or privileged material. Any review, retransmission, dissemination or other use of, or taking of any action in reliance upon, this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited. If you received this in error, please contact the sender and delete the material from all computers." 113