In article <6p89q9$d33@gizmo.dimension.net> you write:

I have noticed that different 'fiber cuts' (or other transmission facility problems) seem to get different kinds of reactions. Some carriers' fiber cuts seem to pass unnoticed. While other carriers' cable cuts make the front pages of newspapers across the country.

A lot of it depends on who is impacted by the cut, and how the cut impacts traffic. Some observations by me, the non-telcohead router-geek to just buys circuits and expects them to work: 1) Why do my "SONET protected with redundant rings" based circuits go down from a fiber cut? I have to assume either I was lied to, and they are not redundant, or both "redundant rings" ran down the same path...making me wonder what good they ever were in the first place. Carriers with diverse physical paths win big here. 2) Why do circuits "bounce" after a cut. I've seen circuits pop up and down after a cut, which just causes all sorts of problems. I think this mainly comes from attempts to "re-route" traffic. Having the circuit bounce up and down is almost always worse then if it was just down. 3) Does the cut take out a lot of little circuits, or a few big ones? Taking out 4 OC-12's into a mae often makes things 10,000 times worse than taking out the 360 DS1's that could be in the same fiber. (IP like networks often can absorb a T1 here or there in reroutes, but not an OC-12....excess capacity has it's cost.) I think more data would be highly useful, but not necessarily in the sort of way the FCC looks at it. The FCC has issues like "will 911 work", where the ISP has issues like can I provide service to my users. In some ISP networks losing a circuit would be inconvenient, but fully planned for and not impact service. Also, things like point 1, was there a redundant path so the "cut" had minimal impact are very important to me, as a purchaser of circuits. There could be a lot of value in an tracking the performance in a more abstract way than the FCC does. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@dimension.net Network Engineer (CCIE #3440) - Dimension Enterprises 1-703-709-7500, fax, 1-703-709-7699