"The Adolescence of P-1" by Thomas J. Ryan - a good read, even today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

So, what you're saying is that a companies ethics, in fact it's *corporate* ethics is changeable depending on which government it is working with?

Horse-hockey!

This all depends on the physical architecture used for the said circuit. I don't know how frequently SONET is used these days on HiCap and Tier-1 circuits, but if your network is designed using what is known in the industry as UPSR (Unidirectional Path Switched Ring), there is a redundant path on another circuit that can handle the traffic around the disabled / failed segments of a SONET ring. If the fibers were located (physically) close to each other (which is not a good, secure practice), then this would be a huge problem, and the segments within the failed portion of the ring would be "in-wrap" so segments at either end of the failed sections would still have signal, and therefore, service. Multiple fiber cuts, as were reported, might have been done to intentionally disable this in-built service protection of UPSR. If there were 3 cuts, as reported, this would had to have been a coordinated & direct attack on the carrier's infrastructure.

Actually, the username of the poster you were responding to fits their post perfectly - at least, that's how *I* remembered Archie Bunker.

....we can't have nice things" sub-thread in 5....4....3....2....1.... .....oh, wait.

Seriously, though - these are the kind of people that just make me want to walk up to them and just stare at them, wide-eyed, for about 2 minutes and calmly say "What is wrong with you". These are the same kind of people that used to throw rocks at my car when I drove up the hill to 1 Cyclotron Drive in Berkeley to work at Lawrence Berkeley Lab in the 80's - total nut-jobs who, despite their obviously misguide attempts at trying to make the world a "better place", are utterly clueless as to making the world a truly "better place".

And, of course, this is based on your expert evidence?

Your dog does not hunt, sir - you cut-off it's legs.

Posted like a true AC.

...or Tin-foil?

I recently purchased an HP TouchSmart tx2-1270US Notebook / Tablet PC, and I'm loving the ability to use it as an actual Tablet / Slate when needed. The touchscreen is very responsive, and the handwriting conversion is top-notch...and my handwriting sucks!

--ScottKin

Blame the Tier-1 & Tier-2 backbone providers and telcos for skimping on SONET implementations; UPSRs (Unidirectional, Path-Switched Rings) do not have the line-fault switching capabilities that a BLSR (Bi-directional, Line-Switched Ring) because of the single-direction design of a UPSR. Since UPSR networks are cheaper (1/2 the fiber-lay costs) than BLSR, many large telcos and backbone providers play fast and loose with fiber capacity and provisioning...which, in this case, apparently came back to bite them.

The original ARPANet, as it was designed at that time in history, *was* redundant and met the needs for the spec. The ARPANet / NSFNet is as distant from today's Internet as a Blue Whale is from granite.

During "The Great Internet Build-out" of the late 90's, outages similar to this were more common than what you have been led to believe; the reason why people heard virtually nothing about those outages was because (a such outages weren't "visible" to those outside of the telco industry, and there wasn't such a demand 10 years ago for such high capacity circuits, and (b circuits were more carefully planned-out and used BLSR as much as possible. Now, where stockholders go crazy if their investment in a given telco doesn't grow by 10%, those telcos scrimp and cut corners wherever they can - including running SONET networks with inherently unsafe ring topologies.

For more about the differences in SONET topologies, please visit:
http://www.hill2dot0.com/wiki/index.php?title=2F-BLSR

--ScottKin