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Rat Attack Causes Broadband Outage In Scotland
judgecorp writes "Virgin Media's broadband services in parts of Scotland have been taken down by rats biting through the fibre optic cables. It's unusual to have an operator attribute an outage to such a cause, but we would bet it has happened before, given the fibres are carried in underground ducts."
Fibre cables are pretty new for rats to be attracted to. They are a problem for some old cables because animal fat was used in the insulation. They smell the animal fat and chow down.
Oh rats.
My blog
Internet links get chewed up by rodents on an infrequent basis... at my University it happens about once a year and knocks out a building or two. Last year a rodent chewed an underground power main and, according to the power techs, basically vaporized. Too bad it took out power for a quarter of our campus for half a day.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10331826
Isn't this what armored cable is made for?
I work for a telecom company with thousands of miles of fiber and you'd be surprised how 'tasty' some cable seems to be to other rodents like squirrels. While not common, a year going by without squirrel damage would seem very odd.
Of course, drunk hunters do far more damage during hunting season. You'd think the cable had little bulls-eyes printed on the sheathing...
I thought fiber was put in kevlar mesh jackets to protect them from this very same destiny.
Squirrels are a very common nuisance for folks building big holiday displays. They'll gnaw straight through the wires, bite off bulbs, and pull down strings. That it's a problem for other kinds of cables doesn't surprise me.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Kill 10 rats.
down side of the cloud fiber cuts can cut you off.
We had an Internet outage in our house when rats got into the walls and chewed through the cables. They just like eating plastic, and also will chew through walls (and cables) to get to the other side.
It's no surprise that the most effective rat poison (I discovered after extensive research!) was developed by a phone company - Bell Labs.
It was also interesting to me that the Wikipedia article on rat poison appears to recommend the most widely used *ineffective* rat poison, which also made by a large company..., and lists some stupid problems with the competition.
The most effective, if you are wondering, is based on Vitamin D, and has the advantages that (1) the rats eat a fatal dose on the first feeding, and hence do not get a chance to learn to avoid it; (2) pregnant rats eating the poison do not give birth to rats that are immune to it, (3) since vitamin D isn't really a poison as such, if another animal eats the rat, there's very little risk of secondary poisoning.
So we solved our own rat problem, but I had to do a lot of learning about rats and rat poison on the way!
Live barefoot!
free engravings/woodcuts
...on your definition of "rats".
http://s3.amazonaws.com/theoatmeal-img/comics/state_web_winter/tumblr2.jpg is no longer a joke then..
Could completely cripple the modern world.
This was just a test. We don't know when they'll strike in earnest.
I know a thing or two about these guys. Here is my story of rats attack.
Around 2005, I got a message on my cell phone at night, from a monitoring server, that one of the app servers is down. I tried to login remotely without success, ping didn't go through. I dragged myself up and went to the server room. A colleague who received the same message got there at the same time. From the terminal, we saw that the server was running just fine. We checked the network cable, it was cut, and looked like it's bitten by something. Other cables were also bitten to lesser degree. Some little animal was grinding its teeth, we guessed. We replaced the cable, and went back to sleep.
The next day, I passed by a co-worker's desk, saw he had a web cam. I borrowed it, and set it up in the server room, near the machine whose cable was bitten, and wrote a cron to snap images during the night.
We received another message the second night, another server went down. We went to the server room again, sure enough, another bitten network cable. Not only the network cable, the head of my Philips cell phone charger was completely bitten off. I was working in the server room the day before, and had my cell phone charged there, and forgot to bring the charger back to my desk. I was pissed. We check the photos snapped by the web cam... ah, here it was, a small rat, the size of the fist of a small boy. I told myself I'd take care of that pest.
The third day, we checked around, and found a small hole in the elevated floor in a corner. We guessed it must come out from there. We surrounded with whatever we could find in the office, put an old IBM machine that had been replaced and was laying around, connected the web cam to that machine and set up to snap photos again. My colleague went to the grocery store to buy a mouse trap, and put it there. We hoped that the mouse trap would catch it right there.
The third night went without any incident. In the morning, we went to check again. Oh, it was awful. The rat was lying there, its hairs all messy, and we still could smell something. The power cord of the machine was half bitten. We put the photos together into a slide show, and saw that as it was biting into the cable, there was sparks coming out, and the rat was obviously electrocuted on the spot. We showed that to the colleagues in the office and had a good laugh, some of them thought it was really gross, and that we were cruel, and that we had really mistreated animals.
Rats and other rodents will chew on anything soft enough to chew on.
Yes they will. I remember reading back in college about German armor divisions having lots of trouble on the eastern front due to rats and mice. In very cold conditions, the Wehrmacht would park their tanks in barns with lots of hay in an attempt to keep them from freezing up, and rodents would get into them and chew the wiring up. When I was younger, I had a couple of pet rats, and learned that they'll chew on pretty much anything. There's a hard, rock-like substance that you buy in pet stores for them, and they chew on it out of natural instinct to keep their teeth worn down. Rodent teeth never stop growing, so if they don't chew on something, their teeth will get too long and injure them.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
A few years ago we had a sprint outage, the culprit? A farmer cut a fiber optic line while burying his cow, according to Sprint anyways.
All the news lately that makes a dystopian future far more likely than any nirvana like stasis of hi-tech utopia being achieved.
Aside from rodent type rats eating away at civilization's infrastructure, there is a long history, as recent as last week (just google "bridge stolen") of homo sapiens type rats gnawing away at the same.
Nothing new here...
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
On multiple occasions in the past squirrels have taken out my cable/internet service. They climbed the pole and chewed through the cable coating, until presumably they got a shock, then left. Then it rained and the cable shorted. Once the cable was fixed, they came back and did it again - 2 more times.
This phenomenon is not limited to buried cable.
Solution: run high voltage through the cables to kill the offending vermin, then they cannot return? (need an electrician's input on the feasibility of this)
Maybe the telco's could put some of the spicy curry around their cables -- the same recipe that put 10 Scots in the hospital in a recent "hottest curry eating contest".
ugh... forget it. I hate rats.
At the ISP where I work one of our ticketing systems actually has Rodents as a standard cause code.
on a high fibre diet.
Optical cables have an outer kevlar layer, how can a rodent chew through that?
Um... sorry, that's all I got.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
A kitty attack fix the problem at morning.
I worked on the installation of the telecommunications network for a new airport in Asia several years ago. The airport was built on land that had been a palm oil plantation so there were lots of rats until traps brought the population down. It happened rather frequently that rats would chew through our fibers and it was a major irritant, but the biggest problem they caused was the fact that cobras were attracted by the rats. ----- RN
After reading just the headline, my first thought was a Remote Administration Tool attack. Ha.
working in broadband i can personally test first hand that mice / rats cause these types of outages in the system i work in squirrels are particularly problematic because of how close the Arial plant is to trees... its just something that has to be dealt with with distribution systems...
It's time to pay the piper!
The correct term is "Rodent American".
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Did it eat the carrier pigeons, or just bite through the taut string?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Thankfully we don’t buy their products here in So Cal.
So now it is offtopic to make a joke involving the story? or is it just offtopic to make a first post, that OMG, doesn't even say first post and relates to the story?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
So what did they throw?
Every end has half a stick.