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Vandalism In Arizona Shuts Down Internet and Phone Service
schwit1 sends news that vandalism on the outskirts of Phoenix, Arizona knocked out internet and telephone service for hours across much of the state's northern region. ATMs, credit card functionality, and emergency services were all affected.
Officers are trying to determine who cut through a pipe containing a fiber-optic cable on the outskirts of the city, leading to the outage on Wednesday, which hit northern Phoenix and large parts of the north of Arizona. ... The four-inch-thick pipe, which carries a CenturyLink cable, was found sliced through in an area where it is exposed to the elements as it crosses a desert wash about a quarter of a mile from a residential area, Holmes said. Police said the investigation is in its early stages, but that the pipe may have been vandalized by thieves looking to steal metal.
Where I live, metal thefts are fairly commonplace, although requiring recycles to keep ID records has helped. If there isn't a guard at a construction site, it won't be surprising for any copper to disappear, as well as A/C condenser units smashed open with the compressor gone.
Of course, the thieves that were looking for fiber really don't know/care what they cut... they just realize they are not getting a gob of meth for it.
meth heads have all the concentration and none of the frontal lobe action, they even try to steal live high-tension lines. which are aluminum around a steel core, nothing there but electrocution, folks.
my sleepy little weekly has a copper theft just about every other week when it's not cold enough to kill outside. cut open a container, clamp the wire to a bumper, and GO! that's even easier than breaking into a vacant house and cutting all the wire and plumbing out, although the little darlings probably are stripping that 24 gauge for days before they can sell it as bare wire.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
No, it was most likely metal thieves. There's tons and tons of them in Phoenix, since that city is chock full of meth-heads and illegal aliens, both of whom steal any metal they can get their hands on so they can take them to the metal recyclers in South Phoenix and get a few bucks. They've had all kinds of problems with metal theft there for a long time; not only are new-home construction sites frequently burgled of their wire and copper pipe, they've even resorted to stealing catalytic converters from vehicles in parking lots (using a portable reciprocating saw).
There's been lots of cases of metal thieves trying to steal electric wire from high-voltage installations and being killed in the process.
You might want to try out some grammar and punctuation while calling others ignorant.
RTFA. Pipe was exposed where it crossed a dessert wash. And only a quarter mile from a residential area. Please, put the tinfoil back in the box, and try again.
I work for a major telecom.
These systems *do* have backups and redundancy.
The moment that cable was cut, the system will have started an automated load-shed and re-route at the OC-48 level and above. You'll see messages from the OC-192 trunks shifting to new routes, jumping to spares, and generally trying to route around the damage.
The problem, is that these are OC-192 links. The smaller circuits riding them, such as 10-meg ethernet, OC3, DS3 and DS1 do not get shifted around to available trunks unless they happen to be on the 192 that gets shifted. They're essentially along for the ride.
*IF*...(and that's a very big "if") the smaller circuit is especially critical and vital, then they can TRY to arrange a re-route and stuff it onto one of the alt-routed links. But that takes authorization from people in business suits that fly out to their weekend home in the Hamptons.
So yes. There are backups. If there weren't, this outage would have been international news, and not just a blurb on Slashdot.
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