This type of redundancy isn't the biggest risk point here, however. We lost a large chunk of connectivity to another region of the state because of what was either a single threaded fiber, or a collapsed ring on a handoff between AT&T and Verizon not too long ago. It was the only route available into the area, and it was the sort of traffic you don't want to carry on the public internet (IE: Running IP here wouldn't have done any good, because it would have had to be private anyway). Verizon experiences serious fiber cuts every day in some portion of their network, it seems. The biggest risk factor, from my customer's point of view, is still the connections between them and us. (And an overwhelming majority of those are IP) -Paul Alex Balashov wrote:
Seems to me like one of the main arguments for moving to IP infrastructure - alongside the numerous arguments telco people have against it - is that it makes this type of redundancy a lot more achievable and cost-effective.