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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."
I imagine this is how the mob would get into the net neutrality / protection racket.
Read: if you shoot INSIDE the fiber and along the line, you can get a lot of fiber in one shot.
So it was deliberate, but also quite quick if done right too. Pretty devious way to take out fiber because the entire length needs replacing, not just a short section that requires a bypass.
Funny, but makes the idea of running fiber through the sewers sound pretty good from a security standpoint. There, I've done it -- let the fiber/sewer jokes begin again.
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Something doesn't add up here, most American's wouldn't have a clue how long that is. I'm wondering if this is a European planted story, to bring up gun control????
Hehehe..ok, guess that a bit far fetched for even the most enthusiastic conspiracy theorists...but, still, kilometers in a US story? Strange.....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
This story doesn't make a bit of sense. They dug up some cable, and found it had been shot? Are they saying someone first dug it up, shot it, and then gave it a decent burial? That would be a lot of work. Does the cable perhaps run along a sewer tunnel, and someone crawled down the tunnel and shot up the cable over an interval of a kilometer? (Just be alert for a guy who's talking very loudly, and keeps saying, "Speak up, I can't hear you".) And no, a shotgun blast is not going to penetrate anything like a kilometer of cable if you shoot down the length of the cable.
I'm not saying it didn't happen, but this article tells me little more than that there was a cable outage, and that the cause can't be explained coherently. Maybe it was mice...they've been known to chew up fiber optics. But that wouldn't make a good headline, would it?
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
well since IT guys are probably the ones that care about this, and I don't know about you but I measure pretty much anything regarding cabling in meters...this makes sense. Measuring your cable in feet is a little silly I think but that is just me and that is a whole other debate.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
The radio station I once worked for used to have its 10,000 watt transmission cable shot out all the time. Bored hunters who can't find any game are extremely destructive. We probably averaged $5,000 - 10,000 per year repairing it.
I have a fiber network connecting 35 sites in my city, and about 60% of our outages come from someone shooting the fiber (we've had bullets, buckshot & an arrow) but it's not because they hate fiber! It's usually just a GOB (good 'ole boy) shootin' at some varmint. In this case, someone probably drove down the fiber in their trusty pickup shootin at birds along the way. Buckshot has a wide dispersion patter (ask the guy that Cheney shot) so they would probably get some fiber on each shot! I've got a piece of fiber on my desk with several pellets embedded in it! Move along... Nothing to see here!
Keep passing the open windows...