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

[Morgan Storey]

Most isps barely have the two connections, remember when telstra's Sea-me-we
cable was cut by an anchor. They didn't have enough bandwidth on their
failover links to provide there customers with international bandwidth, let
alone their resale customers. They had to go out and buy some more of the
southern cross cables bandwitdth. It was still a month of slow internets. Or
the time in the late 90's when half of US sites weren't available because
Telstra's peering with an American Telco who only had one east/west coast
link, that just happened to go through a train tunnel and came lose from the
ceiling, the train broke that link.

What I don't get is why they didn't do something like that, re-route their
traffic over a telstra pipe and absorb the cost, or re-route via
Perth->Darwin->Brisbane, I am pretty sure they have a link that does that.

Realistically though this was a very isolated incodent, both links going
down at the same time, as someone said I don't think we will see this very
often. It doesn't mean it isn't redundant, or that it wouldn't survive a
Nuclear blast, it was just bad luck. I would hate to be the contracter who
ripped up the cable...

On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 3:51 PM, Null Ack <nullack at gmail.com> 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.
>
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-- 
Regards
Morgan Storey,A+, MCSE:Security.
Senior Network and Security Consultant.
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