On Sun, 2007-12-02 at 06:24 +0100, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > On Sat, 01 Dec 2007 23:13:31 EST, gmaggro said: > > Ah yes, I remember an old story not too dissimilar... multiple redundant > > lines, all severed at the same time with the same backhoe. Idiots. > > To be fair, it's often not "idiots".
Sometimes, it *IS* idiots. In 1987, I was working on a telecoms-based business (French Minitel). We got about $20,000 per hour revenue tied to the X25 lines coming in, which meant a service interruption of an hour was bad, any service that would last a week would be death to the business (it was also highly competitive - if you were offline for a week, a lot of customers would find another service). So we went to our provider France Telecom (there wasn't a choice: there was one state provider for telco, and that was it), and we said "ok, we need a set of backup lines in case the current set gets cut". "No problem, our engineer will be there on Monday to install the modem and check your connection". "Hmmm? Where does the backup line go thru?" "Why, the same trunk, we've got plenty of spare capacity in it". Took us two months of careful negotiation to explain in words of no more than 5 letters that when we said backup in case of cut lines, we really meant it. -- Vincent ARCHER [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tel : +33 (0)1 40 07 47 14 Fax : +33 (0)1 40 07 47 27 Deny All - 23, rue Notre Dame des Victoires - 75002 Paris - France _______________________________________________ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.grok.org.uk/full-disclosure-charter.html Hosted and sponsored by Secunia - http://secunia.com/
