List Watch: NANOG - Subject: Fiber cut in Ontario, Canada cutsoff @home users
[FAC: Was anyone here affected? When international radiotelphone systems were in their hay day, prior to satellites and subsea systems, the theft of outside plant provisions (copper, steel work, you name it) was a common problem, as it still is in many regions of the world today. Maybe someone who still has their toe dipped in internatioal wireless waters can attest to this. Elmat?
In South America, during the Sixties as I recall, a dominant cause for outages on International Radiotelephone routes was the theft - and sabotage (especially in revolutionary war-torn regions) - of coaxial cables and the iron work from tower structures, themselves, running between major cities and the microwave repeater stations and fixed HF radio stations that were attached to remote rhombic antenna farms, on the international side.
Even the copper from the rhombic antennas that used to fill acres of land, and whose individual dimensions approached the size of an NFL football field, depending on the wavelengths they supported, were stolen.
Here's the NANOG post:]
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Greets,
According to a news report this morning there was a fiber cut
which is used to service @Home customers in the province of Ontario.
Apparently, the fiber was cut as thieves were trying to salvage copper.
First, seti@home's facilities were cut off by a similar act of "simple
copper mining" and now it looks like another of the same sort of incident.
I wonder if there are statistics available showing a growing trend of
network outage due to copper theft.
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A reply:
> It's surprising that in this era of huge fiber capacity with SONET, ATM and
> MPLS and WDM that a fiber cut should take out an entire province full of
> users...
Beats me. As one of those users, I did feel it. Everybody else seems to
be up and running just fine, so it makes wonder about @home's topology in
Ontario.
> At one time that fiber link from Toronto to Buffalo was on an unprotected
> fiber segment, but that was years ago... hmmm
Probably during the good ol' days of "Call before you dig." |
