North American Network Operators Group
Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical

Re: Thursday Hawaii telephone mishap

  • From: Steve Goldstein
  • Date: Sun Oct 28 11:36:07 2001 
At 2:06 AM -0500 10/28/01, Sean Donelan wrote:

...Although it receives limited public
discussion, the public telephone network has significant risks in
comparison to the Internet.  Because of the public discussion, and
customer demand, ISPs have been forced to invest a lot of money in
network backups and now offer SLA's significantly better than any
telephone company offers.  On the other hand the telephone network
has been undergoing a lot of "value engineering" for the last decade,
reducing their network backups.

I wonder if we have reached the cross-over point, and the Internet is
now effectively more reliable than the public telephone network.
FYI, at about the time of the break, I was engaged in a Web-based meeting that included the Maui Supercomputer Center. We were using a phone bridge in San Jose, CA. The phone conversation persisted, but Maui's Internet connection dropped.

--Steve
--