Router Suggestions

Thu Jun 18 02:00:43 UTC 2020

> On Jun 17, 2020, at 12:50 AM, Mark Tinka <mark.tinka at seacom.mu> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 16/Jun/20 23:26, Owen DeLong wrote:
> 
>> Count your blessings…
> 
> I know that we are lucky that in the markets we operate, local depots
> are available. There are other markets in Africa that may not be so
> lucky. If we ever built into those markets, we'd certainly cold spare as
> much as possible, as we used to in the current markets that the vendors
> didn't have local depots for 10 or so years ago.
> 
> 
>> As I said, YMMV, but I’m betting your vendor doesn’t stock a second copy of every piece of covered equipment in the local depot. They’re playing the statistical probabilities just
>> like anyone else stocking their own spares pool. The biggest difference is that they’re
>> spreading the risk across a (potentially) much wider sample size which may better normalize
>> the numbers.
> 
> Yes, it's just like a bank - they hope not all customers come to
> withdraw all their cash on the same morning.

Yep… FWIW, my experiences were in locations in the US with NFL teams and multiple depots proximate to each location. That didn’t help in these cases.

> We run a CRS 4-port 100Gbps line card that I know is not very popular
> among other operators in the markets where we have them. We had one fail
> in a smaller city a few weeks ago. We pay for NBD, not 24/7. A new line
> card arrived promptly, the morning after. I did hold my breath, but they
> managed.

Yeah, that’s far less likely to be a problem than a popular line card or other component that turns out to have a bad batch. Generally, they’ll keep at least one of everything any customer has in at least one nearby depot. OTOH, I bet if you’d had two of those cards fail, you might
have been SOL on the second one for a couple of days.

Owen