Gunplay Blamed For Cutting Fiber

coondoggie writes "Internet service providers in the US experienced a service slowdown Monday after fiber-optic cables near Cleveland were apparently sabotaged by gunfire. TeliaSonera AB, which lost the northern leg of its US network to the cut, said that the outage began around 7 p.m. Pacific Time on Sunday night. When technicians pulled up the affected cable, it appeared to have been shot up over a length of a kilometer. 'Somebody had been shooting with a gun or a shotgun into the cable,' said a TeliaSonera spokesman. The company declined to name the service provider whose lines had been cut, but a source familiar with the situation said the lines are owned by Level 3 Communications Inc. Level 3 could not be reached for comment."

Comments

Not Level3

[Exstatica]

Its not speculated that it was Level3 its Cogent. Its all over Nanog.

Re:Wait, wait, wait.

[Liinux]

Since when did Sonera operate in the US? Since quite a while back, TeliaSonera International Carrier has a massive worldwide backbone. You can get a map of it at their website:

http://www.teliasoneraic.com/tsicWeb/tsic/sectionM ainpage/begin.do?cid=2afc3cbd9546d010VgnVCM100000d 83ab183RCRD

Re:I usually stay out of gun control debates...

[quanticle]

From TFA:

The damage affected a large span of cable, more than two-thirds of a mile [1.1 km] long, near Cleveland, TeliaSonera said.

So, no, the original article was in Imperial measurements, but the summary converts it to km for the sake of having a round number.

Re:1 kilometer == Distance of a Single Shot

[sumdumass]

A shotgun shoot a pattern that spreads out. The shot would eventually hit the walls of the tube and while bouncing off, each point of contact would remove inertia as well as deflect it into the other side. I can't imagine a single shot going 1 kilometer in distance like this.

1 km is over 1000 yards. Most shotguns loss their effectiveness after 70-80 or even 100 yards and rarely have enough punch to kill something after 60 yards or so. And this is in an open field without the small confined walls the for the shot to bounce off of. I would be surprised if you could get a shot to go more then 30 yards in a tube like this and still have enough energy to penetrate the fiber lines.

Re:1 kilometer == Distance of a Single Shot

[DJCacophony]

Buried fiber optic cable has signs marking it along the way, to prevent this sort of thing from happening accidentally.

Re:I usually stay out of gun control debates...

[Anonymous Coward]

2 feet (0.3 metres, roughly)

2 feet is ~.6 meters. .3 is just 1 foot

Article is wrong, it was Cogent not Level3.

[Kadin2048]

I think the article may be wrong.

Over on the NANOG mailing list, which has a lot of people from the major U.S. backbones and networks subscribed to it, it is being reported/said that the line was Cogent's, not Level 3's, and that Cogent at one point had an advisory up about it.

Lots of people posted traceroutes that seem to confirm that it was definitely Cogent that took the hit. Packets were basically going all over the place on their network yesterday, and people who had fixed their routers to prefer Cogent over other backbones (apparently Bell) were having some slowdowns as a result.

See http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/msg02483. html or here for the thread index (lots of followups).

Re:Article is wrong, it was Cogent not Level3.

[Anonymous Coward]

No.

Cogent is leasing some number of dark fibers among the fibers that Level3 owns along this route that were shot full of holes. The fiber affected was Level3 fiber, and Cogent was one of the Level3 customers affected by the cut.

No, I meant what I said and said what I meant

[A nonymous Coward]

No they don't