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."

Comments

animal scent in the insulation

[ToasterTester]

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.

Re:animal scent in the insulation

[wvmarle]

Rats and other rodents will chew on anything soft enough to chew on.

Many such cables will come with protective layers because of that. Underseas cables (different scale, same idea) have a protective metal sheet in the insulation, and often bite marks of sharks or other big stuff have been found on cables.

The thing that surprised me at first is that there was apparently no redundancy. Though upon reading TFA it seems about 100 customers were affected, so the outage is not that big, and the area affected can be so small that it's simply not worth laying a second cable as backup. As in: you have only one cable going from your home to the neighbourhood switch. And that neighbourhood switch likely has only one upstream cable again. Only when it's getting big enough the second uplink comes in play.

Happens a lot...

[CaptainPuff]

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.

It's happened before

[__aatgod8309]

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10331826

And squirrels

[PuddleBoy]

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...

best poison... and internet and rats

[Ankh]

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!

"Chew on anything"

[DesScorp]

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.