Travis Pugh <tpugh@shore.net> wrote:

Verizon even has a diversity option on their tariff, although there's some doubt as to whether or not they bother to make sure it is really diverse.

i have had some discussions about getting such diversity with Verizon folks in upstate NY, and it was clear that their engineers understood the issues, giving us all the right answers about how they were going to do it. there still would have been some risks involved; the diverse circuits would have crossed at one specific location in the RPI tech park (they pointed this out explicitly), and the connection to the IXCs on the other end of the local Sonet ring would have been in a single CO, and thus still a single point of failure, but this was really hard to avoid. they were quite honest with us, actually, which was a complete suprise given that it was the phone company (we had previously talked to other Verizon reps who were total idiots, so if someone disagreed with me on this assessment, i would expect that they were dealing with one of the idiots and never got past that to the folks who knew what they were doing). since we didn't go forward with the project in question, i have no idea how it would have worked out in practice. richard