outage scales

Tue Nov 23 19:33:47 UTC 1999

Reacting to "2000 ds3s" as a large number.

We are approaching the day when we will see a million ds3 backhoe cut. At 45 
terabits, this is within the range of lab WDM systems (>1Tb per strand.) We 
are still years away from seeing these widely deployed in the ground, but the 
scale of outages is going to go way up.

Oddly, it is also possible that the impact of such an outage may go down. If 
the bandwidth prices get cheaper, then it becomes more reasonable to have high 
levels of diversity. We all understand the difficulties in keeping that 
diversity real in the current world.

jerry