Understood. Thanks.

As already stated , this is likely to be a RO2 ( resilient option 2 ) the resilient ‘ fibre’ should maintain a minimum separation distance from the existing service, often originating in a different exchange to the existing fibre service , typically, if the original fibre enters at the south side of the building the resilient fibre enters from the north side , thereby avoiding a total loss of service should someone with a digger excavate through the primary fibre cable , if there are any pinch points , where the separate fibres physically get close to each other , this is usually within the customer’s building, (if there were only one cable route into the comms room for example ) , the customer is made aware of any pinch point and they either accept it or spend even more money to maintain separation, obviously some pinch points are ( in practice ) unavoidable, but carry very small risk of a single incident damaging both circuits and unless a second comms room exists for the RO2 service , eventually the resilient equipment will be in the same room as the original service anyway .

There is an RO1 option, this uses the second network port of the existing Adva NTE , the fibre routing resilience is the same as RO2 , but obviously if the NTE itself failed , then the service would be down irrespective of a resilient route existing , hence why most businesses that want a resilient option , go for RO2, not RO1 , as for the relatively small difference in price , its as close to 100% resilience as possible , and if resilience is deemed essential, most people would go for the maximum practical resilience available.

Edited by Iniltous (Fri 12-May-23 17:34:15)

In reply to a post by lucavigg:

I can sort of understand his concern. He runs a high turnover food distribution business. Attended operations are from midnight until 4PM the next day. The bulk of the orders from buying consortia, large hotels and restaurant chains come in between 4PM and midnight, when no one is on the premises.

I would have suggested hosting the order handling system in a proper data centre, where redundant connectivity is cheap and there's good backup power. Or of course, there's "the cloud", which is basically the same thing but charged by the hour.

Shoving business-critical servers into a single cabinet in an overcrowded closet is asking for trouble. What's the plan if one of those servers dies?

I realise I'm preaching to the converted, and there's not much you can do if the boss went ahead without talking to you

If BT had told us this info at the time, I’m fairly certain we would’ve gone for RO1. There is a pinch point about 20 feet from the premises but a new ADVA turned up on Friday and was installed.

In reply to a post by candlerb:

I realise I'm preaching to the converted, and there's not much you can do if the boss went ahead without talking to you

We’re still in the dark ages as far as the ordering system and server is concerned. The thing that got him really spooked is two recent outages of his Voip system. Most orders come in by direct voice, voicemail backed up by email or email directly. Most buying consortia will email notification of a new order and rely on the supplier to login to their systems to do the rest.
Restaurant chains, football catering and golf clubs still phone their orders in. It’s quite surprising how manual the process still is.

I think if I had interrogated BT and found out exactly what we were getting, I would’ve suggested the 5G option but, as I said he got spooked and signed on the dotted line pretty swiftly.

Good luck with it all. Sounds like someone should sit down with the boss and do a proper risk review of your entire IT infrastructure and systems - before he knee jerk signs another contract that probably won’t have any bearing on making his business more resilient.

This is the right answer.

We had BT NET fibre as the primary, and Virgin fibre as the backup where I worked.

I've never seen an ISP actually offer RO1