OC-3 just a short time ago was a very big pipe with 155.52 Mbit/s of throughput possible. Today many have that to their homes or at least half of the vintage OC-3 pipes performance numbers.

One option to limit the impact of any one backhoe is rented space even equipment in a harden data center with diverse service providers feeding the common "cloud" data center from opposite side. That way you have no single cable or service provider running in the same conduit that can fail you. The next step is to have the site hosted in a least two geographically dispersed data centers. That way a whole town can fall off the earth or be shut down with a disaster and the other site thousands of miles away can serve the customer. Amazon, Rackspace and many others sell those types of services in a very competitive market.



It takes two back hoes, two fires, or two floods to kills something that this. A good provider will offer services in three or more.