Faster 'Net growth rate raises fears about routers

Wed Apr 4 14:41:23 UTC 2001

Travis Pugh <tpugh at shore.net> wrote:

> Verizon even has a diversity
> option on their tariff, although there's some doubt as to 
> whether or not
> they bother to make sure it is really diverse.

i have had some discussions about getting such diversity with
Verizon folks in upstate NY, and it was clear that their engineers
understood the issues, giving us all the right answers about how
they were going to do it.

there still would have been some risks involved; the diverse
circuits would have crossed at one specific location in the
RPI tech park (they pointed this out explicitly), and the
connection to the IXCs on the other end of the local Sonet
ring would have been in a single CO, and thus still a single
point of failure, but this was really hard to avoid. they were
quite honest with us, actually, which was a complete suprise
given that it was the phone company (we had previously talked
to other Verizon reps who were total idiots, so if someone
disagreed with me on this assessment, i would expect that they
were dealing with one of the idiots and never got past that to
the folks who knew what they were doing).

since we didn't go forward with the project in question, i have
no idea how it would have worked out in practice.

richard