Are people still building SONET networks from scratch?

[marka at isc.org (Mark Andrews)]

In message <CAE_aTPPCPXMN-Rx2zRjG7FcbyDSqaT=gR7Hc6+ZhRj0Pmtsvxg at mail.gmail.com>
, david peahi writes:
> In my neck of the woods, critical locations often exist "in the middle of
> nowhere", resulting in underserved facilities, where best effort networks
> such as metro Ethernet cannot be trusted to remain available 24x7x365. Many
> times, during prime business hours,  I will see a telco metro Ethernet
> spanning tree convergence which results in my traffic re-routing for 20-30
> seconds over my private backup network path, then switching back to the
> metro Ethernet path after the telco technicians have finished their
> maintenance. Several times when I have called in a trouble ticket, the
> telco tech has asked "what is the big deal, it was only a 20 second
> outage?". In the Enterprise environment, a planned spanning tree
> convergence in the middle of business hours is one of the quickest ways for
> a network engineer to be relieved of their duties, but apparently the bar
> is considerably lower in the telco environment.
> Not only that, but the telco SLAs associated with metro Ethernet are
> totally bogus, with a best round trip SLA of 20 milliseconds, ranging up to
> 50 milliseconds for "bronze" service. For short distances of 100 miles or
> less (rule of thumb is that light travels over fiber at 0.80 x speed of
> light, or 1000 miles in 10 milliseconds), an SLA of 20-50 milliseconds
>  amounts to fraud,  just another way for the telcos to scam the consumer.
> The tone of many of the entries on this thread where the user is depicted
> as being unreasonable, underscores the need for a coordinated national
> broadband policy in the USA, based upon the Australian model in which the
> government is building out fiber to every residence and business, no matter
> where they are located.

The NBN is to be delivered over a mixture of fibre (93% of homes), wireless
and satellite services[1].

[1] http://www.nbn.gov.au/about-the-nbn/what-is-the-nbn/

> Regards,
> 
> David
-- 
Mark Andrews, ISC
1 Seymour St., Dundas Valley, NSW 2117, Australia
PHONE: +61 2 9871 4742                 INTERNET: marka at isc.org