What amazes me is that Telstra maintain that a truck hitting a pole was a *completely* unforseeable event and that even in retrospect they could not have been expected to have forseen that *one* *day* a truck would hit a 'single-point-of-failure pole' and that they could not have been expected to have planned for it.
I think that the question one must ask first is "Just how many such poles are there?" Probably thousands scattered around the country. Just the same as there are thousands of point where a backhoe can cut fiber and disrupt *local* networks. That is what the telcos mean when they say "that they could not have been expected to have planned for it". It has been repeated pointed out in this discussion that residential subscribers do not pay for redundancy. At work we have two connections to TC via two different fibers going from two different buildings over different paths and, of course we pay for it. That's in addition to a connection to APE and additional international bandwidth from there via KAREN which is completely separate for the TC circuits. This is backed up by duplicate routers, firewalls etc. and plenty of redundancy within our network. Ultimately these are all 'security' decisions. To make such decisions on a rational basis you weigh up the risks against the cost of failures and the probability of them happening and the cost of fixing them. There is *never* enough money to remove all the risks so you then fix those offer you the best return. Even if you are spending 'enough' for some value of enough you will occasionally get caught out by low probability events (or faulty analysis ). Accidents will happen. Count on it. Russell