This was a product available from the earliest Bell System days. You could specify a couple of options. One is local path redundancy or diversity - intended to get you to another central office and not use the same cable as another specified circuit. A second option is called avoidance where you could tell the phone company to avoid a certain area. AT&T would let you order a SONET node which guaranteed two different entrances for fiber ring going through at least two different COs, expensive and you pay the install or agree to megalong contract terms for a minimum number of access circuits.
As an example, the US Government ordered command and control circuits and explicitly had them avoid major metro areas (that were likely nuclear targets). The deal in practice though is that these options were rarely ordered since whoever orders it pays all the initial construction costs. If you building wants a connection to other than your home CO, you have to pay for all of the plant construction to reach a point where you could catch a cable going that way. As to who is selling it? Almost anyone if you pay for that level of custom engineering. More importantly, can you verify it? The US Government had a deal with AT&T to show them the entire AT&T backhaul network architecture. Not many customers get that level of access. If anything they are going to show you the "lines between cities" type map that we all know has little to do with reality on the ground. Steven Naslund Chicago IL >Who is selling this product? I know SLA compensations on service disruptions >is a thing, but there the downside seller is carrying is limited to MRC, that >is seller gets higher margin on SLA products than nonSLA, when when outages >>are factored in. I don't see the business case for the seller in contractual >terms you are proposing. The amendment has to make more money for the seller, >otherwise there is no point for them to sell it, unless of course the product >>is unmarketable without the amendment. >I would anticipate if this product is available the seller limits downside in >the contracts in such way that it will always be profitable to the seller to >sell the insurance to you. > >-- > ++ytti
