Slashdot Mirror
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.
A friend of mine was trying to 'help out' some down on their luck folks and they said 'thank you' by ripping all of the copper out of her rental house. She replaced it all with PVC and they came back and ripped out the walls again expecting there to be copper in there.
Tweekers have an incredibly high level of motivation and a relatively low level of guilt for the things they are willing to do for money
Wherever You Go, There You Are
You may work for a major telecom, but obviously not THIS major telecom. This is CenturyLink, formerly Qwest, formerly US Worst: they have a REPUTATION for this sort of thing. Where I work and live, JUST 5 MILES FROM DOWNTOWN PHOENIX and their Arizona corporate headquarters, we can't get ADSL because the copper is too rotted in the ground, we're too far away, and they won't install DSLAMs: we had to get bonded T1's instead. No joke.
In this case, the fiber cut was right alongside Interstate 17, near Black Canyon City. This isn't the middle of nowhere, as you assert, but in a suburb at the edge of Phoenix metro (these days).
As for the "backup systems", yeah right: not only was internet out, but so was phone service to the outside world. Let me repeat that again: *NO* service to Phoenix or the outside world! This includes the Navajo Nation to the New Mexico and Utah border. Including the 4 counties involved (Apache, Coconino, Navajo, and Yavapai), that is over half a million people. Cell sites and phones except for a few Verizon ones (probably mountain-top and microwave back-hauled directly from Phoenix) were all down as well.
In fact, the fact that TFA is from San Francisco and not an Arizona paper proves this isn't just a /. "blurb", as you say. This is a (former) Baby-Bell cutting too many corners, plain and simple. I also happen to know first-hand of a few other places--some owned by Frontier (now), some a Bell system, where there is one lousy connection to the outside world and absolutely *NO* backup! Oh, and it was that way since day one, long before my grandpa was born! SONET rings? What's that?
I work for an agency that was impacted by this and there some oddities in what is being publicly reported vs what actually was experienced.
The first thing is that this conduit was in a vault with a manhole and it wasn't like this conduit was just sitting out in the open for world+dog to see it.
The next thing here is that CenturyLink does not have a redundant route up to this area and has not had a redundant path during the US West/Qwest/CenturyLink days. A redundant path is slated to come online in the next several months but will initially only serve part of this area although it would in theory bypass a cut like happened in New River this week.
I have experienced three cuts like this with CenturyLink in my over 10 years working in this region so at some point one has to ask what a telco like CenturyLink is doing with the money and taxes collected for services.
In this case the response by CenturyLink for information was severely lacking as it took them several hours to confirm that there was an issue. I'm not talking about calling the general help line here I'm talking about high level managers responsible for major CenturyLink systems here. Now I get that something like this causes chaos but it isn't comforting if high level CenturyLink minion X says something to the effect of 'something is wrong, will let you know when it is fixed, bye'.
Another interesting thing was that this outage took out more than Internet such as dial-tone (local like PRI based and obviously long distance), 911 services (not widely reported but true), cell carriers, local cable companies, etc.
It was pretty obvious that ye olde central office locally is just a digital switching point and the brains for these services are elsewhere. I'm not sure if cell carriers like Sprint, cable companies, etc were using the same fiber conduit or cables or if they have their own cables in the impacted conduit but they definitely took a hit as well during the outage.
Physically there are not backups at this time and quite a few outage maps for CenturyLink showed congestion in Phx, Denver, and Seattle during the cut. I don't know if Denver and Seattle were related to this meaning CenturyLink shuttles traffic up this same route to Vegas, Utah, etc or if these were related to other issues, router meltdowns due to the link being severed, etc.
Socially this was interesting as it had a large financial impact - no ATM, no POS, etc - and really highlights how dependent we have become for digital connections as the backdrop for everyday life.
I don't suspect that this was North Korea, Mexican cartels, etc although one municipality did call out their SWAT team initially as maybe they thought this was the big one, Red Dawn or something like that.
Lastly, I have seen a picture of the cut conduit, again in a vault, and while it is possible that it was metal thieves I'm not sure I buy that as the conduit isn't copper and there are plenty of more lucrative ways to swipe some metal since the length of pipe we are talking about here is fairly small and there is the matter or having the cables in the pipe.
Maybe really dumb criminals (pipe could contain water, electrical, etc, no way to tell by looking at it), dumb criminals who thought this was copper cable in the conduit, or someone trying to make CenturyLink look bad (not a high bar to jump mind you).
No bueno all around and the telcos collectively need to get off their butts and put in properly secured infrastructure with, wait for it, multiple physical paths.
Anonymous here for obvious reasons...