Apologies for continuing this thread, but --
I don't understand this preoccupation with "early warning" systems on access to said manhole. What's the point?
There are two possibilities here:
1) Someone goes down there and breaks something. You *already* know when this happens, because of your normal link monitoring.
2) There's a false positive (i.e. nothing malicious is done).
From where I stand, these seem like ways to spend money in order to increase the reporting noise.
Or am I missing something?
Irregardless, it would be wise to focus on the *common* causes of outages. The things that happen and cause customers pain every day, due to more mundane occurrances like backhoes.
Regardless of whether it's a hacksaw or a backhoe that takes out a cable, the customer is still down. Simple economics seem to dictate that the most attention should be devoted to the problems where you get the most "bang for your buck" - i.e. not movie theatre plot scenarios that happen once in many blue moons when there are so many other, far too common (and yet mundane) causes of outages.
- S