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Australia Cockatoos Chew Billion-Dollar Broadband (bbc.com)
Australia's multimillion dollar broadband network is under attack -- from cockatoos. From a report: The National Broadband Network (NBN) company said it has spent tens of thousands of dollars so far fixing cables chewed by the birds. Australian broadband is already criticised for being slow. According to a recent report it ranks 50th in the world for internet speed. NBN estimates the bill will rise sharply as more damage is uncovered. In an attempt to improve Australia's internet speed -- currently lagging behind many developed countries at 11.1 megabits per second -- a national telecommunications infrastructure project has been instigated and is due for completion in 2021. But engineers returning to sites have found spare cables chewed and frayed. The culprits are cockatoos, a type of parrot which normally eats fruit, nuts, wood and bark.
Blue ruin! I'll get some tinnies while you chuck another pie on the barbie, mate.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Whoa, tens of thousands of whole dollars? Sounds like a major problem.
"...the bill will rise sharply ..."
Would those be the cockatoo's bills?
cockatoos, a type of parrot which normally eats fruit, nuts, wood and bark
They eat bark. If you don't want them to eat it, stop including the sheathing with the cable.
Just jam the cable up their ass and integrate them into the system. Or start using âoecarrier cockatoosâ because itâ(TM)ll probably be faster than the current broadband down under.
The culprits are cockatoos, a type of parrot which normally eats fruit, nuts, wood and bark.
My dog chewing my cables and barking at ungodly hours is bad enough. Glad I'm not living in 'Stralier.
why not "flavor" the cable jackets with something the birds find distasteful?
"Prepare the birds, and truss them like a quail or any other small bird. Line a pie-dish with the beef, over it place 6 of the paraquets, intersperse slices of egg, parsley and lemon-rind, dredge lightly with flour, and season with salt and pepper. Cover with the bacon cut into strips, lay the rest of the birds on the top, intersperse slices of egg, season with salt and pepper, and sprinkle with parsley and lemon-rind as before; three-quarter fill the dish with cold water, cover with puff-paste, and bake in a quick oven." - Excerpt from Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management (published 1861)"
Yet another reason for people to be screaming, "This Broadband is for the birds!"
Like they do it in real developed countries.
Not the US evidently.
spare cables chewed and frayed
American telcos generally lock up equipment, largely due to risk of theft. Concerns are justified, by the way---I've seen a box of F-pin connectors get stolen. Who has a hundred coax cables they need to put ends on?
If birds chew on the cables, then why not run buried lines and store spare cable in sealed containers?
"The company says it is currently installing protective casing which costs just A$14 each, that will protect the wires from birds in future and save their three billion dollar network."
Oh wait, they already figured out how to deal with it. The article is pointless. "Business is inconvenienced and decides to deal with it." Wildlife has always been a nuisance for utilities; in America, it's the squirrels.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
The birds are just angry that they don't have Internets
N/T
currently lagging behind many developed countries at 11.1 megabits per second
Yeah as an average... 11.1 is pretty good (if it's wide spread), but comparing to averages completely blurs the consistency of reasonable speeds across those developed countries. Just because those countries have some gigabit fibre in small concentrated areas makes "developed countries" looks good on average. My anecdote: I live in the UK in a major city and I only have 3 Mbit ADSL available (3 on a good day)... And all I hear from slashdot is that this is even worse in USA especially when it gets rural (AKA i don't live bang in the centre of a city). Getting everyone above a reasonable threshold is far more important than puffing up your global image by installing a few super super high speed lines for 1e-10% of the population and boosting your average.
If the birds’ poop didn’t spawn radioactive nanobots then I consider that a win.
The internet really is a bunch of tubes.
Cockatoo's don't dig holes, if they have a problem with wildlife eating the cables they should have buried them, then the spiders would protect them.
The Cyber Squirrel conspiracy goes well, I see. But I'm on to them.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
It is like saying a man shits in a billion dollar skyscrapper. What matters is the damage and that is in 10s of thousands of dollars.
I used to have a pet Umbrella Cockatoo - known in the bird-owners world as a destruct-o-too. Could crunch a broomstick like you and I could crunch celery. The cables should have been buried,
"According to a recent report it ranks 50th in the world for internet speed..."
Of course... most of the internet traffic is going outside Australia, and then gets bottlenecked at the inverters that flip the bits upside down so that the rest of the internet can understand them. This is why digital goods ie movies, music and apps. cost so much more for Australians.
Well, that's what the industry told me, at least.
-- Insert witty one-liner here. --
Not only is Australian fauna apt to kill you, but if you somehow survive they'll kill your access so you can't even call for help.
With all those bites on thier network you would think the bandwidth would improve at least a bit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
FTFA:
"The Hungry Beast team had read about the South African experiment and assumed that as a developed western country, Australia would have higher speeds. The experiment had the team transfer a 700MB file via three delivery methods to determine which was the fastest: A carrier pigeon with a microSD card, a car carrying a USB Stick, or a Telstra (Australia's largest telecom provider) ADSL line. The data was to be transferred from Tarana in rural New South Wales to the western-Sydney suburb of Prospect, New South Wales, a distance of 132 km by road. Approximately halfway through the race the internet connection unexpectedly dropped and the transfer had to be restarted, the pigeon won the race with a time of approximately 1 hour 5 minutes, the car came in second at 2 hours 10 minutes, while the internet transfer did not finish, having dropped out a second time and not coming back. The estimated time to upload completion at one point was as high as 9 hours, and at no point did the estimated upload time fall below 4 hours.[12]
"
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
And I hear snowcocks can be a handful too.
From the trees after a holiday visit by a Comcast executive: "Privatize! Privatize! Or we chew your socialist cables. Privatize! Prevent net neutrality! Privatize!"
Maybe the birds just pick that cotton looking thing to their nests.
We have the same issue here every fall with squirrels chewing the insulation off the fiber. Just what are they making the insulation out of that makes it so appealing to animals?
Its the same as saying
Oh no, a cockatoo ate my homework.
Bury the cables? That's so obvious there must be a reason they're not doing it. Musn't there?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Cockatoos are very intelligent and are perfectly capable of finding food themselves. The problem is many people feed them and they get bored, so they take to pulling out nails. Some communities here have begun to distribute flyers warning people not to feed them but stricter enforecement is probably needed, especially as in some places feeding birds is actively encourage, even though they don't need this type of help.
"What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Ralph Waldo Emerson
As they say: Gawd help all of us.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
"The culprits are cockatoos, a type of parrot which normally eats fruit, nuts, wood and bark."
The wikipedia should be updated with "they also enjoy the sweet, sweet taste of the internets"
Why aren't these cables armored and buried underground? This is incompetence on the part of the cable providers, entirely!
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
Some folks I know in Australia describe the cockatoos there as amazingly destructive. They travel in flocks, and will occasionally settle on some poor somebody's roof and rip half of the shingles off, just for fun. TFA is no surprise to me.