[OT] Optus: Why does cutting a cable bring down the entire network?

[Daniel Mons]

Null Ack wrote:
> Even still though, only two points for major backbone connectivity is
> pretty lame for a major ISP especially considering the national
> peering that is going on between many ISPs.
> 

Once again, as a consumer are you willing to pay 20% (or worse) extra 
for further redundancy?

At AU$10,000 a KM to lay carrier grade fibre optics, you do the math to 
run a third cable around Australia.

Yes, more redundancy is good.  But at the end of the day Optus is a 
business and customers are fickle.  I can tell you now that bumping 
prices by 20% will see half your customer base jump to another carrier 
(with less redundancy but cheaper prices) within 30 days of the price hikes.

Reality is a cold, harsh mistress.

As for peering - that only gets you so far.  Not to mention that again, 
you pay for the privilege of routing all of your traffic over your 
competitors cables.  During the Singaporean undersea cable cut of 2001, 
Optus charged Telstra 10c a megabyte for all traffic over their cable. 
Again, do the math and figure out what that cost Telstra (and their 
customers/shareholders) for 1 week of outage to all international traffic.

I choose my small business ISP for the cost.  No, I don't get 100% 
uptime, nor do I expect it.  But I'm not willing to pay 10 times the 
amount for a few extra hours of uptime a year.

-Dan