MCI WorldCom fiber cut in White Plains, NY

Sun Oct 10 13:26:11 UTC 1999

At 11:49 PM -0400 10/9/99, William Allen Simpson wrote:
[snip]
>
>APS is really a useless feature.  Even when you get the contract to say there
>are diverse paths, they will later groom the circuits to put them in the
>same bundle.

Quite right that grooming is a constant threat.  Depending on the carrier,
one safeguard:  when you write a contract in which you pay for facility
diversity, write in a provision that lets you audit the Data Circuit Layout
Record (or whatever the specific carrier calls it) periodically -- perhaps
every 30 to 60 days.

While they may groom both paths into a single cable, they will document
this.  By Murphy's Law, of course, they will tend to groom just after
you've audited the documentation, but it's some help.

I'm trying to remember the details, but I believe it was MCI in the Chicago
or Florida area (not to single them out, just an example) that was sued
successfully for not diversifying media for which facility diversity was
specified, even though there was no actual outage.
>
>Paul A Vixie wrote:
>> why pay the complexity and cost overhead of SONET if you're not building
>>rings?