[Outages-discussion] Fiber Cut in Southern NJ

[Bill Wichers]

Aerial is not actually all that less reliable than underground. Aerial
is more prone to weather damage, but underground is a lot more likely to
be hit *accidently*. 

There is also the collapsed ring / single entry cost saving measure that
is common for building adds.

The simple rule is that if you go to a typical customer and say we can
do x but y is *so* much better and only costs *this much more*, the
customer will go with the cheaper option. Then one day somebody comes
along and whacks the fiber, or the squirrels decide water block gel is
tasty, the customer goes down and it's all the service provider's fault
for not building in more redundancy. The unfortunate reality is that
many, and possibly most, customers are simply unwilling to pay for a
true high-reliability system. 

I've run into this lots of times in the past. It's really only the fault
of the service provider if they either failed to inform their customer
of the service differences, or if the provider didn't build what the
customer ordered (which I've seen as well). If the customer goes down
because they went with a cheap option then that's the customer's fault.

  -Bill

> It's not fine where it's likely to be burned or shot at or otherwise
> disrupted.  Saying, "Oh but we make it redundant" (which these folks
> apparently didn't) doesn't handle the "But you made it low-reliability
> in the first place".
> 
> You don't do that with infrastructure.  You just don't.  If you do,
> you don't get it and should be in another business.
> 
> 
> -george