[57770] in North American Network Operators' Group
RE: Fiber cut?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Sean Donelan)
Tue Apr 22 01:41:06 2003
Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2003 01:40:28 -0400 (EDT)
From: Sean Donelan <sean@donelan.com>
To: Steve Gibbard <scg@gibbard.org>
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.10.10304212132180.13213-100000@toodles.gibbard.org>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
On Mon, 21 Apr 2003, Steve Gibbard wrote:
> This is NANOG, and this is pretty basic, so this is probably the wrong
> forum for this explanation. That said, if a small ISP gets taken off line
> by a fiber cut, it's far more likely to be somewhere between the major
> backbone and the ISP (a circuit which from the ISP's perspective may be
> controlled by the major backbone), than it is that the fiber cut will
> actually isolate the major backbone's POP. The major backbones at this
> point have a fair amount of redundancy built in, while the circuit from
> the major backbone to the ISP is likely to be a single circuit on a single
> path.
>
> Still, even in that environment, most circuit outages are not fiber cuts.
There are no reliable public statistics concerning outage causes for IP
networks. The FCC and NRIC have a focus group establishing a voluntary
outage reporting process for Cable, IP and Wireless providers. See
http://www.nric.org/
Last quarter 49% of all FCC reported outages were facility failures (cable
cuts and similar outside plant problems). Other sources of outages were
Signalling (21%), CO Power (12%), Local switch (12%) and Tandem switch (6%).
