From where i'm sitting, I see a number of potentially
dangerous trends that could result in some quite catastrophic
failures of networks. No, i'm not predicting that the
internet will end in 8^H7 days or anything like that. I
think the Level3 outage as seen from the outside is a clear
case that single providers will continue to have their own
network failures for time to come. (I just hope daily it's
not my employers network)
I don't agree with this 'the sky is falling' perspective and we've seen
these discussions over and over. Survivability was and continues to be
a design goal of anything we do here. Was from the first days and it's
true to this day.
When you implement a critical service, you need to do due diligence on
whether the path chosen meets the needs.
Now the question of Emergency Services is being posed
here but also in parallel by a number of other people at the
FCC. We've seen the E911 recommendation come out regarding
VoIP calls. How long until a simple power failure results in
the inability to place calls?
There are specific requirements (read: gov't regulations) to implement
E911 with a number of redundancy options, typicalling calling for things
like triple path redundancy. While I have worked on E911 infrastructure
in the past and I'm not aware of an exhaustive analysis for E911 over
IP, I don't see a reason off the top of my head why you can't do the
same thing on IP.
Sure, requires careful planning. But what critical service doesn't?
What are you asking for? More gov't regulation?
While my friends that are local VFD do still have the
traditional pager service with towers, etc... how long until
the T1's that are used for dial-in or speaking to the towers
are moved to some sort of IP based system? The global
economy seems to be going this direction with varying degrees
of caution.I'm concerned, but not worried.. the network will survive..
What's your point then? 
There's no panacea for poor implementation. That's why knowledge and
experience is important in network design and it's importance is
directly linked to the definined critical need of the service
implemented.
Sorry, just angst for me here. No visible life.
Thanks
Christian