I for one have spoken in the past in favor of making the FCC Outage Reports public again. If you want to deliberatley destroy fiber infrastructure, you can gain more knowledge quicker by stepping outside your door and gazing upon clearly marked routes, than by reading outage reports. Want to find a bldg where multiple carriers are housed? Read the carrier hotel advertisements on the internet and in print or read NANOG.
I have suffered more from trying to figure out (quickly) over the past few years what's going on in a multi carrier fiber outage situation, especially when a given carrier has IRU's on the competitor's fiber which I have also provisioned my redundany on (and they seem to "forget" that). Many times during outages people in NOCs are spinning in their chairs trying get a grip. The information that is purposely being suppressed from the public by DHS initiatives with the FCC, is also frequently inadvertantly obfuscated within a given orginisation due to turnover, layoffs, mergers and acquisitions, etc. So besides government interference, we are at times our own worst enemy due to lack of adequate knowledge transfer and change mgmt. procedures. Imagine if you will 2 competing carriers, 1 has a cut 22.1 km east of X, the other 3 km west of Y, crews are dispatched, and bingo- collide at the scene.....how many times has THAT happened. Neither realizes they share some form of infrastructure until they are having coffee together while looking at the muddy hole in the ground that the contractor for a 3rd company just dug. It IS a less than perfect world within the industry.
On a slightly different rant - Forget attacking the glass. Take down DNS and SS7 at the same time...hmmm wonder what one company has a lock on a big piece of THAT. enough said. Hope their infrastructure for those things stays totally diverse (no offense meant). Just another thing that I think about at times...
-Keith