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Multiple Fiber Cuts In San Francisco Area
georgewilliamherbert writes "Multiple news reports, mailing list posts, blogs, and tweets are pointing out two overnight acts of sabotage in the San Francisco Bay area, with long distance fiber network cables being cut in two locations in the early morning hours. The first cut, around 1:30 AM, affecting landline and cell phone service and 911 calls in the communities of Morgan Hill, Gilroy, and parts of Santa Cruz counties, was on an AT&T fiber alongside Monterey Highway near Blossom Hill Road, in San Jose. A second cut, around 3:30 AM, in San Carlos, affected Sprint fiber and has significantly disrupted services at the 200 Paul datacenter in southern San Francisco. Rumor says that this may be related to a AT&T communications workers contract having just expired — but no evidence has been published yet in the media, and this could be an intentional act of sabotage by someone unrelated to the company's workers."
The NSA has volunteered to help fix the cables.
Someone should have told that guy not to cut and run!
*ducks*
Too mcuh open, ungaurded land. All it takes is a cut sopmewhere along hundreds of miles of cable to wreak havoc.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Could be someone trying to steal the fiber cables so they could sell the copper.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Infrastructure. Infrastructure. Infrastructure.
then I hope whoever did it gets nailed to the wall.
Just because you're unhappy about something doesn't give you the right to go fuck with a bunch of other people.
There's a term for that, it's called being a dickhead.
In general, I hate people.
Sent from your iPad.
A loss of communication could only mean one thing: Invasion.
Demented But Determined.
Say it ain't so!
Talk about people who never left high school mentality behind. Before the local GM plant closed here in Atlanta my friend's mom worked there and he also took up that type of employment. My ex-girlfriend is a UPS driver but not in the union. All can basically come up with the same type of stories. The first rule I learned about buying cars, don't get anything made just before, during, or just after, an agreement is being negotiated. The second thing I learned is, if you have union buddies order the car and they will follow it through the plant for you... don't order the fanciest electronics but don't be surprised at what is under the seat or hidden somewhere.
Sabotaging one's own employer is old hat. Favorite car tricks were bubble gum wads inside of panels. Dries and falls off after leaving the factory producing a nice rattle. Snappy a few clips helps too - but only inside of areas you can't see or get to easily. Getting drunk at work wasn't that difficult, if you got caught you might get in trouble, for about three days... and most of it goes away. As for my UPS friend. Finding dog shit on her car or under the handles is a monthly occurrence. Having her truck break down more than is statistically probable was a nuisance till a friend who knew the guys made it stop. Real damage to her car happened once till the police actually showed up to see it. Then it was down to harmless; if dog shit can count as harmless.
So I put odds on it being someone inside, someone who knows the areas to hit, just what to hit to not cause an all points freak out, but enough to annoy his employer and possibly the guys who get stuck fixing it. Make the office boys work overtime and see how they like it! Yeah that will show them.
Really it will blow your mind.
Please don't think its a majority thing, the fact is most are very good and want a successful company and job, the twits just wreck it all because they are still in that phase of "I'll hold my breath if I don't get my way". The problem is the rest don't do anything about it for fear of being the next target.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Could be someone trying to steal the fiber cables so they could sell the copper.
Give him a break guys, after all since the cables are carrying photons they can simultaneously be glass and copper. It all depends on what you do with them.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
We learned another important detail about Conficker. Not only does it destroy software, but it feeds on fiber!
.. a large cargo ship that got extremely lost and had to put down anchor.
Get some pipe and welding equipment.
Yours In Corruption,
Ted Stevens
...but how do you repair a fiber optic cable that has been cut? What is the magic process for sticking it back together?
splicing it together.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_splicing
It's like getting two copper wires and just heating the copper to such a high temperature that they melt and re-form one strand.
Back in '05 when our local telecommunications company (TELUS) in British Columbia went on strike, some lines were cut and service for a couple thousand customers was lost. Of course, the first thing the company does is blame the union for sabotage.
Turns out it was just some thieves cutting the lines for copper, but that didn't come out until a month after the labour dispute ended.
Most likely the same thing happened here, thieves aren't exactly smart and most union employees would not risk the bad press something like this would generate.
Free means no restrictions, ironic the FSF's GPL forces restrictions, isn't it? What's your definition of free?
Cut the fiber carefully and cleanly back from the cut, which has ragged ends. Usually a few feet in each direction.
Bring in a fiber patch section.
Go in with fiber polishing gear, to every individual fiber on one side, polish end, test end, polish again until it's smooth enough. Identify what fiber ID that fiber is. patch it together with the patch cable. Repeat on the other side of the patch.
Cross-test to ensure that you didn't cross any fibers in the reattachment - if so, pick one end as new ground truth, and repatch or logically reroute the other to match new physical reality.
Once the whole bundle has been repolished, patched, and tested on both sides, you wrap the patch sections up with new covering (armored section, flexible covering, depends on the cable and location). Apply waterproofing goop.
Put the manhole cover back on. Consider locking it down in place, this time...
This is tedious work, requires careful attention to detail to properly polish the cut fiber ends and repatch them, and for large fiber bundles takes forever. You can start running data through a fiber once its two ends are repatched - you don't have to get the whole bundle back for that - but the whole process can take 24-48 hours depending on how many fibers are involved and how much space there is to work in the trench or down the manhole. In many cases, there's only enough space for 1 or maybe 2 people to be working at any given time, which makes the repairs take forever...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Activity Type Code Desc: PROGRESS COMMENTS
Activity Type Code: PROG
OTDR readings were taken by AT&T West and a cut was located 1600 ft from
the San Jose, CA central office. AT&T West technicians are onsite
working to isolate the exact location of the cut. There are 4 cables
impacted. AT&T Mobility has 61 GSM and 45 co-located UMTS sites out of
service off of Santa Clara Base Station Controllers 15 & 23, and Santa
Clara Radio Network Controller 4. E911 has 52 Location Measuring Units
down. The AT&T West Santa Cruz 11 central office (41,803 ATNs) is
experiencing an SS7 isolation and the San Martin central office (11,904
ATNs) lost it's umbilical and is isolated at this time. The Bailey
remote site (4,973 ATNs) is also isolated. Scott's Valley has 3 out of 4
SS7 links down. The Santa Cruz 01, Aptos, Scott's Valley, Felton,
Boulder Creek, Ben Lomand, San Jose 11, San Jose 13, San Jose 21 central
offices have trunks impacted such that all lines are busy and incoming
calls are receiving trouble messages. The Santa Cruz County SO (178,040
ATNs), Scott's Valley PD (12,007 ATNs) and the UC Santa Cruz PD (14,909
ATNs) are all without ALI at this time. The Gilroy PD PSAP and the
Morgan Hill PD and CDF have been rerouted with ALI/ANI. The Felton CDF
has not been rerouted. There are 17 DSLAMS and 4 ATMS out of service
impacting DSL service. There are 3 SMDI Links down impacting voicemail
service. Verizon's Morgan Hill and Gilroy central offices are currently
isolated. There have been 224,865 blocked calls.
At least this happened in a geographically fortuitous area when it comes to repairing the damage. I hear San Francisco has some of the most experienced pipe specialists in the country
Can't get through to ucsc.edu today.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
I dugg your slashdotteriffic post after I reddit.
No you wont. This is not 62.5/50micron multi-mode fiber. A coupler in a single-mode fiber causes a great deal of signal loss. I have never seen anyone terminate SM fiber anywhere but a termination point (i.e. at the equipment, repeater, or patch pannel inside a building.) "Just install a repeater" is laughable... those things are not free and require power that isn't found in most ditches.
Today, we have very good equipment for making fusion splices -- to the point it's almost automatic. The real time consuming process is getting to the fiber to fix it in the first place. Followed closely behind by the tediousness of getting each strand connected to the correct other half.
It's not multiple cuts. It's just two cuts, done within two hours. The two sites are apparently within an hours' drive.
So it's not some massive conspiracy, just a single person with a saw.
Interestingly enough, while our best-beloved governments are posturing about how they need to enact even more security laws in order to fight terrorism, a single person with a chainsaw is all it takes to deprive a large area of telephone and Internet service, including emergency service.
Vitrus repairo. You never pay attention in Flitwick's class.
-Peter
Nah, this is San Francisco we're talking about after all. They'll probably trace it back to a couple college kids who heard smoking fiber gave you a killer high and immediately start up federally funded fiber-smoking bars.
Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.
This is tedious work, requires careful attention to detail to properly polish the cut fiber ends and repatch them, and for large fiber bundles takes forever. You can start running data through a fiber once its two ends are repatched - you don't have to get the whole bundle back for that - but the whole process can take 24-48 hours depending on how many fibers are involved and how much space there is to work in the trench or down the manhole. In many cases, there's only enough space for 1 or maybe 2 people to be working at any given time, which makes the repairs take forever...
How long would it take to repair if a few lines were cut, and the manhole cover was rigged so that the person opening would set off a pipe bomb or grenade? O.k. What kinda of union hassles/strikes would happen if that happened once, twice, or a half dozen times?
That's something a more competent uni-bomber could do.
Now assume that the fiber-bomber has planned 4/1/2011 to bring down an entire state or metro area. He basically plants a pipe bomb with a timer for his black out date behind or on the lines coming into as many sections as he can find. Let's declare this a domestic terrorist that has used his two week vacation to do this and has only used house hold products found at walmart for supplies. Let's say he is willing to spend $2K on gas and his various supplies. How much of the internet could our fictional fiber-bomber physically take down and how long would it take to repair it?
That's the kinda of terrorist that gives government folks real nightmares. There is no way to stop that kinda of individual.
Yep, AT&T confirms someone climbed down an unsecured manhole to cut the cable in San Jose and in Gilroy. These things don't accidentally cut themselves, so yeah, I think it was probably someone who knew they could do a lot of damage with very little effort, who knew where the manholes were easily accessible and knew which cables to cut.
I can tell from your UID and the description that you know the old school ways.
I never want to see another polishing puck again.
The new fusion splicers really do make it easy as now it is just strip the insulation back a quarter inch for the 62.5 (MM)or more probably 9 (SM), get a good cleave, and let the fusion splicer rip. Have seen a 24 strand cut fixed in about two hours, with about a quarter of the splices at 0.0dB loss (yes, I do mean ZERO) and the rest 0.05 to 0.1.
I think Corning Cable Systems (Siecor) also has a ribbon cable splicer for instant pigtails up to 72 strand, its been a few years since this happened, so not really up on the latest.
Mountain View (and some surrounding areas) have had a power outage, fiber cut and internet outage all within a 24 hour period. The spooks must be setting up some new equipment.
It's really *not* that hard to get to underground conduits and vaults where utility and telecommunications lines run. Anybody who can pry open a manhole or defeat a lock can gain access to these lines, as the type of utility (water, power, gas, telecom) is usually cast into the metal cover itself. Any deranged individual with a screwdriver can access these points and cause a major outage. Even someone knocking down a utility pole or above-ground junction box (both most commonly by accident) can cause a major outage.
Telecom and power runs are particularly vulnerable, as they generally share the same pole, vault, or conduit, as it reduces the digging and pipe laying that needs to be done.
When it comes to fiber and phone lines, the risks are pretty small, as cutting or damaging fiber is easy, and there are no high-voltages to worry about. Phone lines are the same, since the voltage is low enough that a wooden or plastic handled tool is all the protection that is needed from shocks.
The downside of technology is that the more advanced it gets, the more vulnerable it is to failing. The only solution would be to armor fiber runs, but that would not stop a determined nutjob from success and would be extremely expensive.
Might be worth it though in areas where this kind of anarchic behavior is present.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
There's just too many people with nothing to do.
AT&T Offers $100k reward for capture of vandals.
The worst part is that I was reading for a while before I decided to register a user account, as I didn't see the point.
If only I'd known then what I know now...
Look at the bright side. If some mp3's fell out of the tubes they can nail the perps for the truly heinous crime of pirating music. Isn't that an automatic death sentence now?
Could it be retribution for the fact that AT&T got away with aiding the federal government with the warrantless wiretapping program that violated the Fourth Amendment and which the Obama administration seems determined to protect, continue, and maybe even extend?
No, I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I'm a conspiracy factualist. There is a difference...
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
http://twitter.com/attnews
Blame the Tier-1 & Tier-2 backbone providers and telcos for skimping on SONET implementations; UPSRs (Unidirectional, Path-Switched Rings) do not have the line-fault switching capabilities that a BLSR (Bi-directional, Line-Switched Ring) because of the single-direction design of a UPSR. Since UPSR networks are cheaper (1/2 the fiber-lay costs) than BLSR, many large telcos and backbone providers play fast and loose with fiber capacity and provisioning...which, in this case, apparently came back to bite them.
The original ARPANet, as it was designed at that time in history, *was* redundant and met the needs for the spec. The ARPANet / NSFNet is as distant from today's Internet as a Blue Whale is from granite.
During "The Great Internet Build-out" of the late 90's, outages similar to this were more common than what you have been led to believe; the reason why people heard virtually nothing about those outages was because (a such outages weren't "visible" to those outside of the telco industry, and there wasn't such a demand 10 years ago for such high capacity circuits, and (b circuits were more carefully planned-out and used BLSR as much as possible. Now, where stockholders go crazy if their investment in a given telco doesn't grow by 10%, those telcos scrimp and cut corners wherever they can - including running SONET networks with inherently unsafe ring topologies.
For more about the differences in SONET topologies, please visit:
http://www.hill2dot0.com/wiki/index.php?title=2F-BLSR
--ScottKin
I don't give a rat's behind about "karma" here or anywhere else. Don't like what I have to say here? Deal with it!