CMartin@mercury.balink.COM (Martin, Christian) writes:

Is it me, or has nearly every cut in the past 6 months been Worldcom glass? Do they have any redundant rings? Looks like their growth has been too agressive for sound SONET engineering efforts to be employed. But, hey, they have a lot of glass...

I don't have my papers at home, so this is my recollection. Over the last four years cable cuts and other physical outages seem pretty randomly distributed between AT&T, MCI, Sprint and Worldcom. Some years one carrier has more, other years a different carrier has more. However the affect of an outage has not been equally distributed. Each carrier has its strengths in different markets. Worldcom happens to be fairly strong in the Internet circuit market so you read about Worldcom cable cuts on Internet lists. If you were a financial type, you would have thought MCI had a lot of problems. Remember the cable cut in Manhatten earlier this summer, it affected some Internet traffic but the brokers on wall street were livid. If you were an airline, you would have thought AT&T had a lot of problems. Sprint has problems, but I don't know which market segment it is really strong in. Salespeople for each of the above companies are usually more than willing to give you information about the reliability problems of their competitors. Getting information about their own company is harder. I doubt backhoes or gophers will show any favoritism for or against cable installed new competitors such as Qwest or Level3. Never lose respect for Murphy's power. -- Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO Affiliation given for identification not representation