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From: judice@sulaco.enet.dec.com (Peripheral Visionary 08-Jan-1991 0951)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Service Outages, Fiber, etc.
Message-ID: <15901@accuvax.nwu.edu>
Date: 8 Jan 91 14:59:06 GMT
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X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 11, Issue 18, Message 3 of 6


We seem to be really plagued by telecom service outages recently.
Since I'm sure there's not a large increase in the number of cables
being accidentally cut, my suspicion is that more and more traffic is
being handled by fewer and fewer high capacity fiber routes.

Now of course building and maintaining a small number of very high
capacity trunks must make a lot of good economic sense (fewer
repeaters, less cable to maintain, etc.) But, the service outages say
that something is missing in terms of redundancy - which I always
thought was a major part of telephone system design.

Am I just naive to think that the system used to be more reliable????

A joke I've heard recently in telecom circles is "wouldn't it be funny
if fiber optic cable loses it's light transmission characteristics
after being buried for say, 25 years..." The line of reasoning is that
perhaps putting so many eggs in one basket may not be such a great
idea?

ljj


[Moderator's Note: Yes, the system used to be much more reliable.
There was a spirit of cooperation and a desire for excellence which
has been gradually fading away since divestiture.  Now, if a large
segment of the network goes out -- something that was unthinkable ten
or fifteen years ago -- they just say 'use someone else for the time
being', as though that settled the matter. Sad, isn't it.  PAT]