From: Michael J McCafferty [mailto:mike@m5computersecurity.com]

All, Today I had yet another cross-connect fail at our colo provider. From memory, this is the 6th cross-connect to fail while in service, in 4yrs and recently there was a bad SFP on their end as well. This seemes like a high failure rate to me. When I asked about the high failure rate, they said that they run a lot of cables and there is a lot of jiggling and wiggling... lots of chances to get bent out of whack from activity near my patches and cables.

I am curious; what do you expect the average reliability of your FastE or GigE copper cross-connects at a colo?

You're seeing these failures on copper?! I've worked in some places with absolute cabling nightmares on the copper side of things in wiring closets but those were all enterprise situations and we still rarely had failures of ports and even less on the wiring itself. I'd never expect there to be frequent copper issues in a colo where you would not have anywhere near the volume of moving cables around that goes on in an enterprise. On the fiber side, your experience still seems high although obviously much easier to damage fiber cables. Perhaps they have a big mess of a fiber plant and have to fish tape new runs through it and like to snag adjacent cables, etc. It can only get worse if that's the problem and they don't clean it up. David