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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."
same as any other level 3 I'd wager.
Go find your frickin DMG.
34486853790
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No kidding. Only in Amerika could the reaction to something like this be so casual.
"Hahaha, some redneck shot a wire, let's move on to more important news like Britney's Baby."
Apparently someone shooting up a mile of cable only warrants news articles in tech-related sites. A quick Google News search for Cogent finds only tech blogs reporting on this.
Random shootings in Amerika - just not newsworthy.
Racist.
Well, I think they did say it was a shotgun, so it's not just a single bullet, it's many individual pellets (depending on the type of shotshell).
... it seems unlikely.
However I still think that a kilometer -- or anything more than a few feet, really -- is longer than they would move inside the cable. Maybe if you fired at an oblique angle into an empty water pipe or something, so that the pellet could ricochet along inside the tube, but a cable (where the outside is presumably made of some fairly soft material that would absorb energy with each impact)
To wipe out a section of cable that long I think that someone would need to walk along and repeatedly shoot it.
What I find most interesting is that it was deliberate destruction, it wasn't accidental destruction or theft. There have been a lot of cases lately where people have stolen cable or wiring for its scrap or resale value, so I wouldn't have been totally surprised if someone had just cut and then hauled away a large section of cable (although, in the case of fiber, I don't think there's much of a resale value and they'd probably damage it beyond repair during the theft). But to go and destroy it but leave it in place, makes it pretty clear that someone did it quite deliberately, and that the damage was the goal and not just an accidental byproduct.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Maybe because it was just vandalism.
quote: "When technicians pulled up the affected cable..." To me this sounds like an underground cable, not strung along telephone poles along the highway. I don't know how things are handled in the US, but here in Canada, when backbone or trunk cable is underground it is several feet underground. It is often sharing space with sewer pipes. Within a residential area, I have seen cases where cable is threaded in underground (3 to 4 feet down) plastic pipe (ABS? PVC?)in a designated "service corridor" parallel to the sidewalk, an area set aside by the municipal planners for gas, water and communication connections. Either way, there is a fair bit of dirt between the cable and the firearm. From my Reserves days I know that a .303 or 7.62 NATO round will only go about 20 inches or so into the range berm if fired at very close range, depending on soil type. A twenty inch wall of sand bags will stop most small arms fire. The idea of of a bullet penetrating enough dirt to reach the cable, penetrate the rigid pipe and then damage the cable seems implausible. (Even allowing for the fragility of fiber when dealing with impact.) Then there is the fact that even work crews digging for the stuff rarely now precisely where the cable is, they have to dig a fairly wide and long trench to access the stuff. So even if you DID have a firearm and ammunition combination capable of doing the penetration (Barrett .50 maybe?) it would take many rounds fired essentially blind into the ground to get even one hit. Many hits along a 1.1Km length would require many MANY rounds. How many big rifle rounds do you suppose you could shoot into the ground before somebody showed up to ask you what the hell you were doing?
Shooting above ground cable doesn't have the penetration issue, but hitting that line 30 or more feet up is quite challenging as well. Any round that did hit however would stand a good chance of severing the cable altogether, making that section between poles simply fall to the ground at the severed end. There is still the problem of firing multiple high powered rounds without making the local police unduly interested. Does anyone know for sure if this was above ground or underground cable? And is it maybe hunting season in Ohio? If the cables ARE above ground and in a rural area, then maybe some drunken yahoos thought it would be a good idea to use the cables as a target in some macho bullshit marksmanship test. Most hunting rounds can easily go a kilometer or more downrange and retain enough energy to sever cable, on the other hand, deliberately hitting a target that slender from a klick away is a feat even elite military snipers would likely find challenging. Drunken yahoos would have to be within tens of yards to have a hope in hell of achieving it. One or more drunken idiots repeatedly shooting off a rifle within sight of a road does tend to attract official notice even during hunting season in rural Canada.
I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj
Now, I am sure there is probably an access point to the duct that you could open and stick the muzzle of a gun down. Depending on the material, it might ricochet down the length. However, I believe most of these rural runs are made of some sort of plastic, which would mean it was more likely that someone was walking along and pointing a gun down at the dirt. But it would need to be a shallow conduit, and the person would need the gear to determine where it was buried to cause that much trouble for that much distance.
-mls
I hate to spoil all the wild speculation that I'm sure is coming about sabotage, corporate meddling and such...but TFA says "somewhere between Montville, Ohio and Cleveland". Montville and the areas around it (where I live) are in the absolute middle of nowhere. The ratio of hillbillies-with-guns to things-to-use-for-target-practice is fairly high out here. It's not like someone was down in a manhole aiming at a fiber installation...more likely the beer cans fell down and the feller kept shootin' em. Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
This sig intentionally left blank.
Someone got revenge for the utility not burying the cable. Perhaps the installers got tired of burying the cable whilst out in the country, and just laid it on the side of the road on a farmer's plot, and said farmer got annoyed they didn't bury it and shot it up. (Guessing it was in the country given (a) it's in Ohio, which has a lot of farm land, and (b) you'd have to be so far away to not hear the gun shots...though it is near Cleveland that they're talking about...so may be not...).)
Perhaps the cable companies will sit up and start burying their cables now.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
Now there's a completely worthless angle to pursue.
I cast bullets bullets and load cartridges by the thousands in my shop. The tools and materials are simple and cheap.
Ammunition control would be nearly as big a time & resource sink for the government as it's current campaign to stomp out the production and distribution of a certain popular, easy to grow, weed.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
Or, someone damaged the first hundred meters or so of the cable, necessitating the replacement of the whole thing. You can't blow a splice into a restricted conduit...
Since I am From Alberta, you can #include
Really, the point is that it takes several generations to change the default units though - I learned to bake cookies (not the http kind, but the ones with chocolate chips) in a 350 degree oven (F, of course), and even though all new recipe books have the degC values, and my stove with a digital thermostat could display either, you can bet that it is configured to degF because while I can always convert the numbers, I can 'feel' out what 350 is, and know what things cook at on that scale.
On the other hand, when I think of weather, and indoor temperatures, I can only work in metric. Then there are some measurements I can work in either fairly freely (but as noted elsewhere in the comments on this article, I can't convert them in my head well). I will estimate things in feet or meters or miles or km easily. However I can only work with driving speeds in kM/H.
It is amazing how much the units we learn as children are locked into our capability to make estimates and exchange information with each other.
More Caffeine. NOW
Yes, it sure looked like cogent from here (UK).
Connections to the US were being very sporadic, and traceroute showed more than 500ms being added by just one cogent router.
Its sort of worrying how a single cable can cause so many problems. Isn't the net meant to route around such issues?