North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Sonet protection usage

  • From: Sean Donelan
  • Date: Wed Jul 26 14:21:33 2000

On Wed, 26 July 2000, Steve Meuse wrote:
> At 07:10 AM 07/26/2000 -0400, William Allen Simpson wrote:
> >My opinion (based on a fair number of years of experience) is that any
> >ISP foolish enough to have bought APS should also ask proof that no
> >other circuit is provisioned for the same APS.  Once you've done that,
> >a class action might be in order....
> 
> This isn't an issue, when you own the transmission gear (like many NSPs do).

This *is* an issue even when you own the transmission gear.  Diversity
doesn't happen by magic.  You must do the hard work and then audit the
work.  Unfortunately the carrier outage reports are full of circuit
provisioning errors on the carriers *internal* circuits which later
resulted in a loss of service due to a lack of recovery path.

Owning your transmission doesn't mean its configured correctly nor does
it make you infallible.  Large NSPs have the problem of being large, and
they don't always know what all the different parts of the same company
is doing.  

It may seem like redudent work to audit what your own transmission people
did.  But if the transmission group can't provide paying customers with
the diversity they ordered, what makes you think they provide any better
service to an internal, usually funny-money, circuit.  Whether you are
ordering circuits from a different carrier or from your internal transmission
group, if you haven't done an audit, you really don't know what you have.