Carrier reliability and diversity

[Sean Donelan <sean () donelan com>]

The air line reservation system Galileo had significant problems
earlier.

Excerpt from Reuters:
 "The outage began about 8:30 p.m. Mountain Daylight Time on Wednesday
 and lasted until 10:55 a.m. MDT on Thursday, said Beth Tennis, vice
 present of enterprise networks for Quantitude, Galileo's Denver-based
 networking subsidiary. It affected three of the four T-1 high-speed
 data transmission lines supplied to Galileo by AT&T Corp., said
 Beth Tennis"

Although I've found AT&T has the highest reliability of all the carriers
I've used.  Redundant links from the same carrier frequently have a
common vulnerability, the carrier. For things which absolutely can't go
down, I assume even AT&T will have occasional problems.  Personally I
used AT&T Worldnet and Earthlink, alternating depending on who had a
problem.  That's high praise for me.