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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.
"Act of terrorism!"
More likely it was just someone that AT&T pissed off. Just ask AT&T for a list of all the people they have screwed and you'll have an abundance of suspects.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
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.
Fibre-seeking llamas!
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?
Fibre look like copper to the ignorant
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.
That doesn't even make sense. There have got to be a bunch of easier ways to steal metal than going out of your way to find the exposed pipe that just happens to contain out a bunch of important fibre.
These police are complete fucking idiots if they think this was the motive. It's quite obvious the objective wasn't theft, it was just to cause damage.
Or maybe they were smart criminals who had some other crime to perform but wanted the communications of the emergency services to be impaired before they got down to some serious doing of crimes. There may be a bank somewhere in Northern AZ that is still trying to call the police.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
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
Four inch DIAMETER pipe. With piping, the hole goes on the inside.
How so? Everyone gets the same speed....
"just to cause damage."
Or perhaps, to see how much damage it would cause, and how long it would take for the city to recover.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
No redundancies?
Redundancies cost money.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
So all those important communication lines went trough a single pipe, with no backup, and that pipe was fully exposed to boot? That's just asking for trouble.
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.
And you are down (-4) moderations, if we were keeping score.
If you infer from this example that even smart people are drawn to the superstitious and contrived, then at the very least, your reading comprehension skills are sound.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
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.
What sort of dessert was it? I like chocolate wash personally.
I think the problem is that you can't use PVC for hot water supply lines.
That's where you use CPVC. It's stronger than straight PVC as well as resistant to higher temperatures. My old house was plumbed in CPVC.
It's generally a tan color as opposed to white for PVC. The GP probably either didn't know or care about the 'minor' difference - it's still PVC. ;)
I don't read AC A human right
Shouldn't an ISP have at least 2 and preferably 3 or more separate trunk links?
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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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...