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

Re:1 kilometer == Distance of a Single Shot

[Kadin2048]

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).

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) ... it seems unlikely.

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.

How is this even possible?

[morethanapapercert]

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.

Montville, OH

[jours]

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.