Thread, speaking of fiber breaks, self healing, and some recent outages which did not behave according to popular perceptions, here's a note that was posted to the NANOG list today, and it was just too soon following the upstream messages, to let it go.
I referred to the outage below in my message # 3122 to DN, as the one that affected Above.net, who wound up sending packets back and forth, to and from Europe, in order to reach end points here in the States.
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You may remember a major fiber cut in Ohio on September 29 which
affected several providers (Abovenet, GTE, QWEST, and MFS) when
four OC-192 circuits were cut.
zdnet.com
At the time of the initial incident [the carrier] filed an outage report
with the FCC. They have since withdrawn it because it did not
meet the FCC's definition of a reportable outage.
fcc.gov
I don't mean to pick on [the carrier], since as far as I can tell they were
the only one of the affected providers who filed even an initial
report. But the definition of a major outage is really goofy, which
if viewed as traditional voice lines would be over 500,000 channels,
isn't considered an event worthy of reporting or including in the
analysis.
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I believe that the criterion that was set for reportable outages was fifty thousand (50,000) residential lines, or equivalent long lines trunks.
In the outage highlighted above, the equivalent of many more lines than 50,000 were affected, and the Internet was impaired in a material way. Yet, as the poster pointed out, this was not considered a reportable event. Wow.
Regards, Frank Coluccio |
