Verizon outage between Baltimore and Washington

Wed Nov 19 21:19:19 UTC 2008

On Wed, 19 Nov 2008, Steven Fischer wrote:

>   looks like a single break....Baltimore is about 36.4 miles north of
>   Washington, and Laurel is about 16.25 miles north of Washington, with
>   Baltimore being about 20 miles north of Laurel.  All this makes sense.  The
>   part that doesn't really make sense is that our headquarters in right
>   smack-dab along this run in Columbia, MD (about 5-7 miles north of Laruel),
>   and has been unaffected...but a remote office in Hagerstown, about 50-60
>   miles west, north-west of here, is down hard.

The circuit between you and your remote office could be DACS'd across several 
SONET rings between point A and B and if the cut took out one of those rings 
then you'd lose your circuit.  Also, keep in mind that carriers love to call 
SONET rings redundant even when both the working and protect sides of it ride 
in the same conduit, or hell, even in the same buffer.  That makes them a 
little more susceptible to backhoe fade.  There are other possibilities as 
well, such as the protect side of the ring being down for maintenance when 
something hits the working side, the carrier screws up a re-groom, etc...

jms