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Rats 'Cripple' NZ Web Access
An anonymous reader writes "Drat! It was the rat! Telephone, mobile and Internet access in New Zealand was disrupted over four hours after rats were found gnawing through cables. More than 100,000 customers were affected and even the country's stock exchange came to a standstill. Powerless to take action against the rats, Telecom New Zealand is seeking compensation from the electricity company it says is responsible for knocking out another pipeline which eliminated backup services. Nothing like a backup plan."
This must hit a special nerve with New Zealanders, who are trying to eradicate rats wherever possible. There are three types of wild rats in New Zealand, and none of them really belong there: black rats were introduced in the 1860's, brown rats were introduced on Captain Cook's ship in 1760's, and Kiore rats were introduced by Maori settlers in the 960's (plus or minus).
This happened on Monday. Today is Friday.
:)
It was a quiet day at work though
According to the news monday night (this was 5 days ago) they put a post holer through a trunk cable...
(yes it sucked no highspeed for 4 hrs in the middle of a work day...)
G/
My Paintball Pics
http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/NL/FC31E734EFD D0739CC2570290016D8F1
Telecom is an American owned company.
The local loop they use to fleece NZ residents who use their sub-standard "broadband" (Telecom once tried to market 128k plans as broadband..) is in fact publically owned. As the NZ Commerce Commision has no balls Telecom remains in control of this and thus continue to be a greedy monopoly.
The above article should remove any doubt of this.
I call bullshit, I'm weeping croc tears here - it's now happened twice now in the past 6 months for me (in Dunedin), previous one was a backhoe someone put thru the fiber north of here, you may have redundancy where you live but Telecom here is always one accident away from me not being able work at any time. Given the way they are making money hand over fist from their monopoly you'd think they'd spend some money on infrastructure (I can call Auckland from my US Vonage account for 1/3 what it costs to use my telecom phone - the town is plastered with fliers for 1c/min calls to China, why not Auckland?)
Either that or a rat free government policty.
Leave it to a bunch of red-necks to come up with a poster that says "Kill Rats at Sight!"
btw try the "rat quizes." My favorite question and answer is:
9. Why do we control rats?
a) because they are ugly
b) because they spread disease
c) because they taste bad
Heh.
btw you can mod me off-topic. But if new-zealanders were a bunch of oil happy gun toting beer drinking rat haters they'd never have lost their precious precious pornography.
Also of note is the fact that the Alberta government estimates saving over 1 billion dollars since the institution of the rat control policy. 1 Billion!
I'm pretty much a non-violent pacifist and all that, but seriously... kill the rats!!
All the EFTPOS transaction processing is done in Auckland, so everyone south of the cut - about half the population - was isolated from the engine room of retail sales.
To compound the matter, bank ATM networks are all run from Auckland, so people couldn't get cash out either. And similarly they couldn't use electronic credit card transactions because that relies on the EFTPOS network.
The financial implications are pretty severe, though it was only for four hours and on a week day so they're well below what could've been.
"God, root, what is difference?" - Pitr, userfriendly
"God, root, what is difference?" - Pitr, userfriendly
What all the published articles fail to mention is that there is a third fibre running from one end of the country to the other. It is owned by Telstra, the competition. It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that Telstra and Telecom have such a level of psychotic hatred for one another, that they cannot talk to each other except in a Court room. Thus the very idea of setting up the routers so that all three of the fibres are shared is such an anathema that it just won't happen without Government regulation and intervention. Needless to say the Government is essentially a bunch of ignorent wimps who can no more understand the technicalities of the situation than fly. So it won't happen and we will have to suffer the consequencies of serious telecom infrastructure failure from time to time.
It's time for the little peoples of the world to take back ownership of their infrastructures by whatever means necessary. Fighting talk may be, but many of us in the rest of the world are sick of being fleeced by the avaricious in the powerful countries. Oh shit! - I forgot - big countries make up excuses to invade little ones so they can steal their natural resources.
There seems to be something about the New Zealand psyche that just doesn't understand the concept of separate routing and protection of cables.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
No other ISPs, as far as I know, have their own cable linking Wellington and Auckland.
You've neglected to consider BCL, who have 4x 155mbps DMR up and down the two islands. That's easily enough capacity to handle all of NZ's Intraweb south of Auckland at this point in time. Since they're a State Owned Enterprise, they can't exactly tell Telecom to fuck off if Telecom comes to them asking for redundant capacity.
Even if Telecom was peered with other ISPs they would still have overloaded so much traffic onto TelstraClear's network that it would probally slow to a crawl.
You've also failed to consider the capacity of Telstra's network. Fibre is fibre, and when you have a pair of bundles of fibre running up and down the country, it's not terribly difficult to come up with more gigabits per second than an Advanced Network would know what to do with, let alone the pittance of commercial web traffic this country sees.