Slashdot Mirror
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.
Ah, finally a production implementation of RFC-2549...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Yeah they cheaped out by coating the cables in bird seed...
Yet another reason for people to be screaming, "This Broadband is for the birds!"
Like FMC?
There's already a singlemode fiber standard for armored cable with OSP rating. Hell, they have one that's indoor/outdoor rated if one doesn't want to have to fusion-splice as one enters the structure. The FMC jacket protects the watertight jacket inside, and the gel or powder inside of that protects the buffered strands from the water. Works well. Costs some bucks, but works.
If they're doing aerial though, that could be a problem. Would have to find one manufactured as a figure-8 cable or would have to properly tie it to a messenger wire strung between poles.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The birds are just angry that they don't have Internets
N/T
If the birds’ poop didn’t spawn radioactive nanobots then I consider that a win.
Not sure if anyone has done it, but in theory, you could coat your cables with a bitterant, AKA Denatonium. I'm not sure how long the coating would hold up in weather conditions and under UV. I surmise the molecule would eventually crack.
Life is not for the lazy.
They are crying over a 14 buck casing I don't see them actually buying the correct cable for the job.
No sir I dont like it.
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."
They just wanted to have a story about Cockatoos on here
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
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. --
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.
Parrots love to eat hot peppers. Capsaicin simply doesn't affect them.
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?
IP over avian carrier would probably work faster than the present NBN in many areas.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
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.
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.
This is why competition in broadband is important. For years, my parents could only get 6Mbps on Cox (cable modem). Cox refused to upgrade their network in that area. My parents complained about it since at least 2010. Then AT&T/DirecTV (DSL/Fiber hybrid) started to offer 30Mbps in the area. My father quickly switched to AT&T/DirecTV because he is a Netflix addict. Within 6 months Cox lost so many customers they finally upgraded the area to 50Mbps+.
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.
In fact, red peppers depend on birds passing the seeds through their digestive systems and dropping them in nice shady places under trees.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
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.