[solatic]

1. The risk, when you use a competitor's service, of your competitor cutting off service, especially at an inopportune time (like your service undergoing a major disruption, where cutting off your OOBM would be kicking you while you are down, but such is business).

2. The risk that you and your competitor unknowingly share a common dependency, like utility lines; if the common dependency fails then both you and your OOBM are offline.

The whole point of paying for and maintaining an OOBM is to manage and compensate for the risks of disruption to your main infrastructure. Why would you knowingly add risks you can't control for on top of a framework meant to help you manage risk? It misses the point of why you have the OOBM in the first place.

[tonyarkles]

Maybe 10-15 years ago there was a local Rogers outage that would have had the #2 failure you're describing. From what I recall, SaskTel had a big bundle of about 3,000 twisted pairs running under a park. Some of those went to a SaskTel tower, some to SaskTel residential wireline customers and some of those went to a Rogers facility. Along comes a backhoe and slices through the entire bundle.