hearing word of a fiber cut in virgina

Thu Sep 17 06:44:39 UTC 1998

CMartin at mercury.balink.COM (Martin, Christian) writes:
>Is it me, or has nearly every cut in the past 6 months been Worldcom
>glass?  Do they have any redundant rings?  Looks like their growth has
>been too agressive for sound SONET engineering efforts to be employed.
>But, hey, they have a lot of glass...

I don't have my papers at home, so this is my recollection.

Over the last four years cable cuts and other physical outages seem
pretty randomly distributed between AT&T, MCI, Sprint and Worldcom.
Some years one carrier has more, other years a different carrier has
more.

However the affect of an outage has not been equally distributed.  Each
carrier has its strengths in different markets.  Worldcom happens to be
fairly strong in the Internet circuit market so you read about Worldcom
cable cuts on Internet lists.

If you were a financial type, you would have thought MCI had a lot
of problems.  Remember the cable cut in Manhatten earlier this summer,
it affected some Internet traffic but the brokers on wall street were
livid.  If you were an airline, you would have thought AT&T had a
lot of problems.  Sprint has problems, but I don't know which market
segment it is really strong in.

Salespeople for each of the above companies are usually more than
willing to give you information about the reliability problems of
their competitors.  Getting information about their own company is
harder.  I doubt backhoes or gophers will show any favoritism for or
against cable installed new competitors such as Qwest or Level3.

Never lose respect for Murphy's power.
-- 
Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO
  Affiliation given for identification not representation