Speaking of interesting Qwest incidents, I read in a local indie paper today that the DNR fined Qwest something like $115k for damage to wildlife and flora while it layed fiber between Green Bay, WI, and someplace in Canada, and between Milwaukee, WI and Chicago, IL. Interesting incidents if you're into buying politically correct bandwidth. Apparently thier contractors tore up a number of stream beds and whatnot during thier trenching and made no efforts to repair them. Not very nice. Sean Donelan wrote:

You may remember a major fiber cut in Ohio on September 29 which affected several providers (Abovenet, GTE, QWEST, and MFS) when four OC-192 circuits were cut.

http://www.zdnet.com/pcweek/stories/news/0,4153,2345933,00.html

At the time of the initial incident Qwest filed an outage report with the FCC. They have since withdrawn it because it did not meet the FCC's definition of a reportable outage.

http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Engineering_Technology/Filings/Network_Outage/199...

I don't mean to pick on Qwest, since as far as I can tell they were the only one of the affected providers who filed even an initial report. But the definition of a major outage is really goofy, which if viewed as traditional voice lines would be over 500,000 channels, isn't considered an event worthy of reporting or including in the analysis.

-- nicholas harteau nrh@ikami.com