Our redundant fiber plan was a lie, one cable cut proved it

We signed a 5-year contract with a big carrier for dual diverse paths into our data center in Phoenix. I never bothered to trace the actual physical routes. Then a backhoe took out a main conduit last Tuesday, and both links went dark at the same time. Turns out they ran parallel in the same trench for the last 3 miles. My whole disaster recovery plan assumed zero downtime, but we were down for 6 hours. The carrier's SLA refunded us 4 grand, but our own clients saw the outage. What tipped me off was a field tech's photo of the cut, both cables side by side. Now I ask every ISP for a route map and a site survey before signing anything. Has anyone else found their 'redundant' setup was really just one point of failure?

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barbaraschmidt3d ago

Ugh, that's the classic bait and switch. And once you see that photo, you can't unsee it. But here's the next level of that trap: even if the routes are "diverse" on paper, they might still share a manhole, a pole, or a bridge somewhere. I've had a buddy who traced his two paths and found they crossed at a single ancient splice vault. One flooded vault took out both. So yeah, asking for the map is step one, but you also gotta actually walk it or have a tech verify the physical separation at every junction, not just the last mile. It's a pain, but it beats explaining to your boss why the "unbreakable" link broke.