Every carrier has had a circuit go down. The difference is the carrier's
response, in particular how well they keep their customers informed.
On the other hand, there is a significant statistical difference between
major carriers of service affecting cable cuts and the mean time to repair.
Which might be somewhat of a surprise because the physical cuts are more
or less evenly distributed among the carriers, on a pro-rata basis.
Among "major" carriers (i.e. with more than 20,000 route miles active)
Sprint has the fewest service affecting cable cuts
AT&T is the best at keeping customer's informed
> > Routing around the problem, what a concept. More backup for the 2xt1 shop
> > to contimue doing it..
>
> I'm still awaiting the list of providers that never have a circuit go
> down.
Every carrier has had a circuit go down.
On that we agree.
The difference is the carrier's response, in particular how well they
keep their customers informed.
That is certainly *a* point of differentiation, however if the goal of
these "basement dual-homers" is to not suffer downtime due to the
outage of a single provider(much like the organizations that "matter"),
all the responsiveness in the world from a provider whose circuit to
one of the "basement dual-homers" which has failed isn't going to prevent
them from being down, is it?
Like, don't lie to the (BGP) Customer. They generally have already
researched the problem and will KNOW when you are. I'd rather hear a "we
don't know yet" than have some first level NOC monkey make up some story
filled with buzzwords he's heard from upper level NOC monkeys perviously
or to have them blame Tier-1 Carrier-X when from the outside world, I can
reach _ALL_ of Tier-1 Carrier-X's other customers served from the same
POP.
Patrick, it's all in being able to inform YOUR customers. When they call
you, you can't tell them what's wrong because your upstream (doesn't
know>won't tell you|lies to cover their a$$) it makes YOU look like an
idiot. If you can at least tell them what's up and demonstrate that it's
beyond your direct control, you're no longer the bad guy.
You always have to specify to the carrier that you want diversity. For
longhaul, sometimes even big name providers will subcontract to another
provider. For instance, you may get 1 OC-3 from MCI and another from Sprint,
but both might be going through the same Qwest OC-192 from Denver to San
Jose. I've seen it happen and it's always ugly for the buyer when someone
backhoes it. You have to specify and sometimes pay more to be certain of
your diversity.
