Paul A Vixie <vixie@mibh.net> writes:

i take it that it's mostly the bypass carriers and the long haul > carriers who cheese out on ringing their sonet on diverse paths? i know pac bell rings just about everything. how are the other > regionals?

Due to the way the FCC regulations are written, ILECS appear to have more reportable outages. However, due to who carries the most Internet traffic, the cuts which make NANOG tend to involve CLECs and a couple of long-haul IXCs. Many of which aren't reportable outages according the the FCC regulations. I have a problem with the way the reporting is done, in particular the "root cause" analysis. Usually the backhoe is blamed as the root-cause. But as Paul points out, why should a single cut lead to a reportable incident in these facilities? As is usual in other industries, there is often a string of decisions leading up to the final direct cause of the the outage. Whether a regional has rings or strings depends on where you look. In *major* metro areas, they tend to have rings. In the suburbs, strings start appearing. In rural areas, rings or any type of diversity is hard to find. "Rural" isn't necessarily god-forsaken country either. Third-tier suburbs around a metro area are a typical example. They are often spokes hanging off the metro ring. SBC (parent of Pacbell, Ameritech, and others) has several outage reports on file where most or all the circuits in a region were routed through a single facility.