said by xymox1:1) A local outage in my immediate area.
you will only lose power to devices that you don't have on backup. there are very few active devices along an hfc line. the most notable is one that converts the fiber to coax, but this is powered and has a battery backup.
2) A outage that effects my local CMTS and local distribution center
3) City wide power outage
4) State wide outage
because people who sign up for digital voice are using this service (or could potentially use this service) as a lifeline, cox is under the same voice regulations as your typical lec, such as qwest. the gear must stay up for certain periods of time and be under repair slas for uptime. at this point, i'm fairly certain that the holdout would be the battery in the emta unit, as this lasts for ~8-12 standby hours, a timeframe that surpasses the lengths of most outages. each of the components that deals with phone (similar to the "co" of a lec) is on generator to ensure uptime. these "co's" may or may not include cmts hardware (though it would make sense that they would).
an important point here is that the cmts units are not located in every neighborhood. these units more than likely serve several thousand customers (depending on the units involved, uplink and backplane capacity, and desired oversubscription ratio). more than likely, there are one or more cmts units centrally located to an area of the valley. i can't say for certain how cox handles their unit placement, as i am unaware of the cmts hardware and fiber routes being used.
since these units can be remote to the neighborhood, it is much easier to provide backup generation for each unit. however, i am unsure of the uptime of these units and if they are involved in digital voice. the cmts may pass the digital voice frequency to a dedicated pbx (similar to a dslam/pbx relationship for dsl) or the cmts may process the signal then downlink to a pbx for voice routing.
5) The big one. If we loose LA or SF can Cox Phoenix reroute if the Fiber optic lines that run along I-10 west are cut and MAE-West is offline ?
yes. simple bgp reroutes via different announced netblocks or by manually pushing the bgp path-attributes to the upstream providers.
I think Cox Phoenix is peering with Equinix Los Angeles (LA1).
one of the many peering points, but a single peer doesn't really matter.
your path through the internet is controlled by many different attributes that are controlled by your provider. depending on where you are wanting to go, the actual router will decide the path based on as-paths, communities, meds, local preferences, as well as a number of other different attributes set by the upstream provider (and honored by the local carrier), negotiated between carriers, or manually set by the local carrier. this is what makes the internet "dynamic".
q.