Thus spake "Brian Vincent (C)" <VincentB@coppercolorado.com>

What's interesting is the US approached a similar problem once before - redundancy and survivability in the event of a nuclear war. I imagine there's some lessons to be learned there. Granted, they were less concerned about folks running around with boltcutters..

Totally different mindset... If someone nuked the Bell facility in NYC, odds are nobody would care local phone service didn't work because they'd all be dead -- the requirement was only that Boston would still be able to talk to DC. Even so, 50s-era Bell tandem switching facilities are usually located 2-5mi away from "downtown" because they expected that to be outside the blast radius of Russian (er, Soviet) bombs. S Stephen Sprunk "God does not play dice." --Albert Einstein CCIE #3723 "God is an inveterate gambler, and He throws the K5SSS dice at every possible opportunity." --Stephen Hawking