RE: Bet on with my boss

["David Luyer" <david () luyer net>]

Scott Francis wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 21, 2002 at 03:37:56PM -0400, 
> pawlukiewicz_jane () bah com said:
> > Hi,
> >
> > How important is the phone to you? I mean, given some situation that
> > arises, can we solve it without the phones?
>
> If the network is down, the phone is critical. For any 
> complicated problem, the phone is also critical. If the phone
> network is down too, a cell phone may also be important.

For key suppliers it's important that:

  1.  You have a cell phone with a provider who uses a diverse fibre
      path to your core data suppliers.

  2.  Your supplier has at least one contact number that doesn't depend
      on their own network, so you can call them when there's a fibre
      cut.

In Australia, our second largest telco has their mobile (cell) phone
network, land lines (including their support line indial), long distance
services, intelligent network services (1300 number routing) and
internet
services all depend on the one SONET ring.  A ring that was once cut in
two
locations within 12 hours (before the repair was finished on the first
location, the second location was cut).  That pretty much wiped them off
the map Australia-wide (their whole phone and data network couldn't
operate
without key central services) for a considerable amount of time.
Hopefully
they've identified this central point of failure now, and the one
massive
failure will be the only one we experience from them, but it's hard to
know
as simultaneous fibre cuts on both sides of a SONET ring (hundreds or
thousands of kilometers apart) are somewhat rare.

The same telco also has only a single fibre path to Perth, which meant
when I used to be in Perth, whenever they had a fibre cut we couldn't
call
them - all we could do was bring up our backup links to another telco
and
send/receive email relating to the fibre cut.  (There's actually two
fibre
paths to Perth, one owned by the largest Australian telco & ISP, one by
the second largest telco & ISP, but they don't appear to have engaged in
fibre swaps with each other on this path.  A lot of companies who aren't
aware of the small number of fibre paths buy their primary service from
one
of these telcos and a secondary service from a smaller telco, and then
are
surprised when both services fail at once...)

David.