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AT&T Offers $250k Reward To Find the California Fiber-Optic Ripper
An anonymous reader writes: AT&T have offered a $250,000 reward to anyone providing information leading to the arrest and conviction of what appears to be a serial disruptor of fiber-optic connections in California. The latest incident has taken place in Livermore in the San Francisco Bay Area, where an individual thought by the FBI to possess expert knowledge and specialist tools severed a critical AT&T cable, gaining access to the enclosure via a manhole. The attack precedes 11 previous ones in California in the preceding twelve months.
No, "The attack is preceded by 11 previous ones", not precedes them!
I think that's the point. This guy knows the fiber paths and goes around cutting both sides of the ring. Even if all traffic is protected it costs tens of thousands of dollars to do emergency repair work on a fiber cable.
Also, diversity is typically only used from office to office. From the office out to the environmental cabinets and pedestals and so forth servicing individual customers there's typically a single fiber path.
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I'm not in the US so I don't know what your fibre service failure levels are like.....
But what level of redundancy is required and is reasonable? Major backhaul sub-surface cables are rarely cut but when they are it is usually because someone hit them with a digger. In this case you need geographic redundancy to avoid having your redundant cable cut. So you run a second back haul cable in the opposite direction giving you 100% redundancy should either cable get cut. The odds that both cables get severed at the same time is vanishingly small, so is a third cable reasonable to build?
You get way more major failures due to software or in data centres where someone kicks out the wrong plug then you do from the physical fibre in the ground.
Also I would be surprised if any executive bonuses came close to the cost of a fibre run. The monopoly thing is a whole different story and I don't believe it should exist.