Australia OPTUS outage investigated (was Re: DACS blamed for MCI / CSX train problems last week)

[Sean Donelan <sean () donelan com>]

On Mon, 08 May 2000, Mohamed Hirse wrote:
> A start would be if carriers architecture their network to be redundant
> and self healing.

Some do, compare Worldcom's reliability to Sprint's reliability.  Of
course, after the merger things may change (FUD, FUD, FUD).

But even then you can have more outages than you can handle. For example,
Cable&Wireless OPTUS network in Australia experienced dual fiber outages
within a couple of hours bringing much of their network down.

http://www.newsbytes.com/pubNews/00/148623.html

The most reliable network I know about, FEDWIRE, only has 3-5 way
diversity.  How does the fed assure the carriers actually route the
circuits they way they were ordered?  I don't know.