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The Biggest Dangers to Your Fiber
ffejie writes "Fred Lawler, SVP of Global Field Services at Level 3 has an amusing look at some strange fiber cuts that he's seen in his days maintaining a large fiber network across the U.S. Whether it's squirrels, vandals, storms or truckers, it seems everyone has a new way to destroy the fiber that keeps the global communications infrastructure afloat."
I thought it was going to be something about problems with All-Bran.
Well slashdot has been around for a while now...
Whether you like to go on a cruise or hike across the backcountry, the experienced traveler always carries a length of fiber-optic cable. Whether you end up shipwrecked and stranded on a desert island, or lost in the wilderness, all you have to do is bury the cable in the sand, snow, or dirt.
A few hours later, a guy driving a backhoe will be along to dig up the fiber. Hitch a ride with him back to civilization.
When they say "call before digging", I think they mean it...
"...the number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected..." - Dennis Ritchie/Ken Thompson, 1972
A buddy of mine had to sit at the bottom of a muddy hole in the middle of a sunday night splicing fiber once. Somebody used a truck to yank a length out of the ground thinking it was copper they could recycle.
America, always fighting the last war against squirrels. We need to look forward, it is the flying squirrels who represent the risk tomorrow.
Gently reply
FTA -- "Well I’ve saved the best for last. There was a landowner whose property stretched across the border between Georgia and Florida. He was mad at Florida DOT because he didn’t get enough money when they purchased the right-of-way to widen the highway that cut through his property."
Okay, super-raw nerve here... because this is happening to my father's farm even as we speak. (Power company taking a strip directly through the middle of the farm on a state border, used for 5 generations by my family, for an unnecessary power line to nowhere.) The guy is not mad "because he didn't get enough money". He's mad because you threatened him with eminent domain, that he had no capacity to refuse giving up the strip of land, and he's super-mad and frustrated to realize he doesn't actually control what he thought was his own property. And you ruined the use of that property by cutting it in two. And yes, the power company we're dealing with is spewing similar spin in the PR battle. But that doesn't make it so.
He's mad and feeling powerless because you stole something under threat of state violence. Sorry, today I can't laugh at what you thought was your crazy-hilarious "best" punch-line.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
In '67 whilst working for GenTel Wisconsin plowing feeders [average plow depth ~4'] and trenching drops we cut a main [around 120-pair] line from Milwaukee to Madison. No one was happy. Dug out the break, carved out a seat for the splicer, put up a sunshade. Not the most fun we had, but close. Not our fault, as it turned out: the charts were wrong, and the info on them was wrong as well.
The Big Yellow Cable Locator. Also know in the communications industry as Backhoe Fade.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
We have had several cuts caused by backhoes. The funniest was when a backhoe took out our aerial fiber. It wasn't even in the ground!
The worst fiber disaster we've had was when a lightning strike melted over a 1/2 mile of fiber.
For a moment, I actually thought this would have something to do with my nutrition and regularity :(
#6 reminds me of a story Mel Brooks told about his time in the army. Alas, I can't recall which interview and Google isn't being helpful. There's a bunch of media on tvtimemachine, maybe it's one of those.
Basically, shooting at cables has been going on since they started putting them on poles. In his case, the porcelain insulators were a favorite target.
If you have any new ideas on how we can combat these wayward rodents, I’d love to hear from you. We are always looking for ways to improve.
I'm pretty sure this has already been solved. You coat them with a capsaicin powder. Higher on the scoville scale the better.
Little old lady digging for scrap copper slices through a cable and knocks an entire country off the net!.
My property borders a common area of our subdivision that was set aside as an access right of way for things like power and phone cables. But do you think the companies actually use it? Nope .. all the cables actually run on my property along the edge of the right-of-way and then take a sharp turn to cut off a corner. I'm used to having my backyard spray painted all the time with orange paint marking cables.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Verizon "buried" my fiber so that a loop was sticking about 3 inches out of the ground. I hit that one day with the mower. They were out the next morning and fixed it.
A few months later we had some friends over for dinner and they brought their rottweiler to run around in our backyard. They left and I went to check my email before bed... no internet. The dog had dug down the 6 or 8 inches to the fiber and had pulled it up and chewed about 3 feet of it to pieces. Verizon was out the next morning (Easter Sunday) at 8AM to fix it.
I loved my FiOS
A co-worker of mine used to operate a backhoe and told me the power company came out and spray painted the safe place to dig. Well they were wrong and the high tension line melted the bucket and blacked out the neighborhood. So call before digging is BS.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
My apartment complex paid to have Verizon come in and lay fiber, which they did. My roommate even had tv service through them for awhile. But then my apartment complex decided to do some renovations. So they tore down the tubing that the fiber had been in, and hide those messy 'wires' behind their crappy new siding. I was going to switch to Verizon, away from Time Warner/ Road Runner, but I can't do that until the fiber is replaced. Very frustrating.
http://transformativeworks.org/
Refined carbs!
I thought selling stolen cables were only done in third world countries, such as the country where I live in. Here, they burn up the cables so that they could sell the copper to junk shops.
Unfortunately, my previous company was a victim of such thing. There was a storm that knocked a post near our building. Looters, thinking the fattest cable has the most copper, stole approximately a hundred meters of fiber optic cable. Here there is no market value for such items. They did not get any money for what they stole. Our internet was down for one week. Nobody was a winner.
sigh...
When I was at Sprint I heard the story of a cut fiber line. They go to check out the location and the ground is disturbed where the cut is. The tech thought the culprits left before they got there. When they dig down they find a dead decaying horse. The farmer buried his horse on the edge of his property without knowing he cut the fiber.
Another farmer put up a new fence and used the fresh laid fiber line as a guide. He proceeded to cut the fiber numerous times over a half mile with his fence posts. Talk about a costly fence post error.
I have a friend working for Hydro-Quebec (the power company in Quebec) and he told me that some people throw chains in power lines to short them and create a outage, then they try to cut the wires - but once in a while the breakers comes back on at the power company before the wire is cut. Every year they find a body or two because of that.
lucm, indeed.
Don't forget about the old woman in Georgia who took out most of the internet for Armenia when she was digging for scrap metal to sell.
Usually in a big bowl of Kellogg's Cornflakes.
Dropbox drops it like it's hot.
I typically keep to the right lane when I'm speeding. The fast lane is the one the cops watch out for, so unless you're weaving and overtaking everybody at a stretch, it's safer (for your traffic record) to speed in the slow lanes.
I Do dig safe work in the Mass area,2/3s of the time the main line fiber doesn't have any metal tracer wire with it. I have no method of finding a line of plastic and glass in the ground. For this we tell the contractor doing the digging " There is Fiber optic wire in the area, Try not to hit it. Have a good day"
Its also 9999/10000 times there is no tracer wire on services, house to street, and yes here in mass its common for replacement lines to be inches below the surface, Comcast and verizon. Often walking along marking it out I'll see a section where the soils eroded or a root has pushed it up exposing it to elements. (old copper lines.
We work by putting a tone on metal lines and using a receiver to find that tone in the ground.
Why are these dangers to fibre any different to the dangers to copper? What is the point of this article?
years back, there was contractor pushing a water pipe from one side of the street to the other for a new house (the water main was on one side of the street and the house was on the other). well, they managed to push the pipe right through the Verizon fiber that was under the street.. knocked out the phones for that area of the city. we didn't have phones or T-1s at work for the rest of the day.
During a construction project we had a backhoe hit a 2" underground conduit that tied in one building on the peripheral of the campus. The conduit broke open and the cable line was cut, but the fiber, telephone, and fire lines survived. We called the local cable company to splice the cable. The cable repairman arrived and the first thing he did was to whip out his trusty wire cutters and cut everything else in the conduit.
My feeble Googling has left me without an image of this "line gun." I seriously want to see something like this shoot across a quarter-mile ravine.
That's different from the problems that have affected Humboldt, which have to do with geographical isolation and low population density - it's hard to get the diversity you need up there (especially if you want very high-speed connections.)
The Silicon Valley problem involved cuts in four different places the same night.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Copper is only for local distribution these days. Sure, occasionally somebody will take out a bundle of 600 copper pairs and trash a neighborhood's phone lines, but typically it's not a big deal. And there's more fiber getting out into neighborhoods, so there are more fiber cuts that don't affect a lot of people.
But backbone networks are always fiber, at least since the 80s. Bubba the Backhoe Driver may actually hit neighborhood copper a lot more often, but it's more fun when he takes out the backbone route that's feeding half your bandwidth to the West Coast.
Also, L3 is a backbone company, not a local telco, so they're only doing fiber - if they've got customers on copper, like a business with a T1 or T3, they're getting the last mile from the local telco.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The AT&T version of the story was that the farmer was burying a dead cow. I heard it in the early 90s, when I was working on automatic restoration system databases, though by now I don't remember if that was the fiber cut in Georgia in ~1991 that took out an AT&T line just after we'd installed the FASTAR restoration network, or if that was just a boring backhoe cut and the dead cow had been earlier.
(Not to beat a dead horse, of course.) The fence post story is good - hadn't heard that one.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Many years ago, a customer of mine was in the forestry business, and had a railroad to haul trees from their forests to their mill, and they had a few copper T1 lines they ran along the railroad route. Mostly it was buried under the tracks, but where they had bridges it was hanging under the bridge. And every year around hunting season, a few bubbas would shoot out their wires, either because it takes a lot more skill than shotgunning a stop sign, or because there'd be birds sitting on the wire or whatever.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I don't know if they're still doing this, but back in the early 90s when I was working on fiber restoration databases, AT&T used to fly small planes along the main cable routes to look for unregistered construction. If they saw any backhoes they weren't expecting, they'd drop them a package that had call-before-you-dig information, some chewing gum, playing cards, and some leather work gloves (which I gather were basically a bribe.) There were usually about 1000 backhoes within a quarter mile of our cable routes along the east coast, and there were often a couple of them that hadn't called in to check for fiber routes, gas lines, etc.
One of the early competitive fiber providers was Wiltel, who were a gas pipeline company that had started running fiber along their pipelines since they already had right-of-way. They had a real advantage, because Bubba the Backhoe Driver might not worry about a sign saying "Wimpy Fiber that won't slow down your backhoe, please don't dig here", but a sign saying "Gas pipeline" means "don't dig here, it'll blow up and you'll die."
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Boing-Boing story on using a backhoe as a swimming pool toy, with short youtube video.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks