Comment by vitus

By "no way around it" I mean you're going to need to create a circular dependency at some point, whether it's a maintenance network that's used to manage itself, or the prod network for managing the maintenance network.

I absolutely agree that installing a maintenance network is a good idea. One of the big challenges, though, is making sure that all your tooling can and will run exclusively on the maintenance network if needed.

(Also, while the marginal cost of laying an extra pair of fiber during physical installation may be low, making sure that you have fully independent failure domains is much higher, whether that's leased fiber, power, etc.)