nathan@robotics.NET (Nathan Stratton) writes:

To make things worse, many of the new CLECs don't have adiquite trunking to the 911 tandems or PSAPs. Many of my CLEC customers try to only run the minimum number or channels to get approved. Most of them also run all of the 911 over the same circuit or if they have more then one, out of the same MUX.

In the Topeka, Kansas SWBT failure, one of the CLECs did issue a press release pointing out their network was not affected by the software problems on SWBT's telco switch. http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/990702/ks_kmc_tel_1.html There are a lot of CLECs with very poor procedures and preparedness, and 9-1-1 trunks have interesting issues due to their very high visibility and requirements. Most CLECs rely 100% on the ILEC to provide 9-1-1 tandem services. But don't assume the ILECs are as good as they like to imply. For example, I posted about a Southwestern Bell outage on May 27 in central Missouri on NANOG earlier. SWBT filed their Final Outage Report with the FCC last week. A fiber cut near Lake St. Louis on the main I-70 cross-state highway took out operator, inter-switch, long-distance (inter and intra lata) service for 21 Central Offices and 13 9-1-1 answering points affecting 205,000 customers for 5 hours. SWBT's analysis indicates the root cause for the outage was a contractor laying new fiber for another carrier, damaging SWBT's fiber. However, it turns out SWBT has *ZERO* route diversity for this 300 mile route in their network. SWBT has no plans on adding diversity on this route by either installing new cable, or swapping or leasing space on a different carrier's system. As a customer of SWBT, just try to find out about these 'minor' challenges in SWBT's network. -- Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO Affiliation given for identification not representation