hearing word of a fiber cut in virgina

Fri Sep 18 15:49:37 UTC 1998

There IS a difference.  The FCC keeps records of outages which must be
reported by the carriers.   

It is worth checking these out.
Bill Goldstein
Senior Internet Specialist
AT&T
wgoldstein at att.com
TEL:(412)642-7288

   ----------
   From:       SEAN
   Sent:       Thursday, September 17, 1998 2:44 AM
   To:         nanog
   Cc:         SEAN
   Subject:    RE: hearing word of a fiber cut in virgina

   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

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