Subtopics: Redundancy, Hunters. On Sun, Nov 02, 2003 at 09:37:30PM -0500, Robert M. Enger wrote:

You'd think after three previous disruptions, that Qwest would have enabled some form of redundancy.

If a single fiber cut takes them out, it's not _just_ Qwest's fault. A service like 911 should be buying diverse access, with access rings near the customer premises, and if they can't get it they need to be thinking about Microwaves, and if they can't get that they need to think about locating their 911 services somewhere that they _can_ get diversity. Sometimes there are right-of-way issues, so all the fibers go though one place (and I don't expect newspapers to be real precise about whether they're cutting one fiber or one bundle of fibers), but a flood or backhoe doesn't care. A decade ago it was possible to buy physically diverse T1s from most of the LECs where their networks supported it, with physical diversity between the customer prem and the wire center, though most of them no longer offer diversity at that speed (I don't remember how many still offer it at T3 and how many are only at OC3.) John Osmun wrote:

Farmington, NM doesn't have any redundancy either. Two types of problems seem to drive the 3 or 4 outages in the last few years: - electrcity cut-off at fiber regen sites because no one pays the rural electric co-ops - target shooting of splice boxes

One of my former customers, who's in the forestry business, runs T1 cables along their railroad tracks down in the southeast. They occasionally have the usual problems with wet cables, etc. Where they've got bridges, the cables hang down below the tracks, and those also are subject to shotgun fade during hunting season. I don't know how much of it is because birds sitting on the wires make an attractive target for guys named Bubba, and how much is that after shooting up the local stopsigns, Bubba wants more of a challenge, but either way, it seemed to have been a consistent problem. Bill Stewart