APS is really a useless feature. Even when you get the contract to say there are diverse paths, they will later groom the circuits to put them in the same bundle.

APS, just like other things, can be employed less-than-intelligently. That doesn't make it broke. Believe it or not, more than a few times I've actually seen circuits switch to protect work when a fiber cut occurs on the primary path .. and, of course, we didn't read about those on NANOG :-) Given, had the protect path been on the same fiber that extra nanosecond likely wouldn't of provided much protection. Obviously, they need to be engineered and provisioned correctly. I do agree that grooming or lack of correct provisioning needs to be addressed, contractually, with clearly defined significant penalties associated with failure to meet the obligation. Once this occurs, I believe folks will begin to give more attention to such things that seem negligible in comparison to the commission they're about to receive. -danny