Gunplay fingered for internet slowdown US ISPs were forced to reroute traffic after a stretch of fibre-optic cable was shot to bits in Ohio last Sunday night. TeliaSonera lost the northern branch of its US network as a result of the sabotage, which damaged a span of fibre optic cable near Cleveland around 1.1km (or two thirds of a mile) long. "Somebody had been …
Closer to home in the UK, there are BT (Openreach) line maintenance folks in various rural parts of the country (where "field sports" are popular) who are frequently having to repair overhead lines which have had shotgun damage... OK it only cuts off a few customers at a time but typically they don't have the option of an alternate route.
"...What's the chances that the department of homeland insecurity slaps these morons with domestic terrorism charges?..."
Somewhere between 'Zero' and 'None.' Idjiits being idjiits isn't terrorism, and never has been - Not even the DHS would try that one on. Slack-jawed idjiits have been blazing away at the infrastructure at random for so long now that it's become an expectation. Heck, many of the various entities even have set-aside budget for such vandalism.
Still doesn't stop it from being damned annoying, though.
In some areas that's not possible to do depending on who owns the land the cable is running over... in my school district where I work in the IT dept., we had to run fiber from poles to get to one of our schools because it had to run over railroad tracks. It took quite some time to get permission from the railroad to do so, since they own the property that the tracks run on. Do ya think they would have let us dig up their tracks to run fiber under it? Not likely...
They put the utilities on poles because that way they are safe when the storms come... Oh, wait...
Seriously though, it's almost certainly down to cost, it certainly isn't easier to have them overhead (they need to be replaced more offen, harder to work on, etc.), it doesn't look nice, so it must be cost.
There is the argument that it's hard to route cables under private land, but I don't really buy this as it's the same the world over and in Europe we don't have a problem. Also a former company that I worked for needed two separate fibres run under the M4 near Reading, this wasn't a problem.
A lot more than that, it seems. After all, the story made international headlines (in The Register no less).
Fools shouldn't put so much traffic on a single point of failure. They should have alternate routes that traffic will failover to if that one route goes down.
Just like that problem recently when an undersea quake or landslide caused an Asian fiber optic cable to break, and a substantial amount of the far east data traffic couldn't get through and had to be rerouted. But in that case, it's many times more difficult and expensive to run traffic over alternate routes undersea.
"Damned annoying"? hardly.
utilities put line on over head poles cause its faster and cheaper to initially install and to do maintenance. Now under ground cable;es are better protected fro the weather ,but when you have to do maintenance on them the cost is more You have to dig up, pull the lines, rebury the lines repave . Now in must cities they are requiring lines to be berried.
You know if you trace the route that cogents network takes
it does go through London and that backbone those boneheads
shot is the most likely link west to the stuff located on the west coast
of the US so conceivably it could have made some sites there slower
to respond it's a small interconnected world after all and jack asses
now can mess with you from all over.
"Now under ground cable;es are better protected fro the weather ,but when you have to do maintenance on them the cost is more You have to dig up, pull the lines, rebury the lines repave "
BT learnt that lesson in the seventies... that's why they are all installed in clever little things called ducts, with access points every so often, that way if there is a fault they can use a TDR (time domain reflectometer) to find out where, open the access hole and pull that section of cable out. That can't be much more difficult than climbing a ladder and pulling a section of wire between poles.
There is also the benefit of when they need to lay more cables, the tunnel is already there and they can use their little pulling device, combined with a compressor and some lube to put a new cable in.
"so that in case rusky nuke ussky, DoD can boast that they know all about it"
Jesus, I just can't believe people are *still* spouting this utter shite. that's like the third time this month just in El Reg's comments section.
Repeat x 100 : "The internet is not ARPANET, ARPANET was not designed to survive a nuclear strike, the internet was not designed to survive a nuclear strike, my head is full of foamy nonsense."
The irony in this story is that the Internet originated in a DARPA experiment to design a wide-area network that could survive a nuclear war. Maybe the affected ISPs should reflect on that, and re-negotiate their peering arrangements so that re-routing happens without the need for human intervention.
"Just like that problem recently when an undersea quake or landslide caused an Asian fiber optic cable to break, and a substantial amount of the far east data traffic couldn't get through and had to be rerouted."
Was that the time when the total spam level for the whole world went down by half? Can we break that cable again?
:P
@Frasier:
US isn't Europe, and it's *not* the same - the distances between metro areas are far greater, on average. Yeah, digging cuts down on some kinds of costs, but it greatly raises other kinds of costs - the telecoms and power providers here are quite capable of doing basic maths, and have figured out what costs *them* the least. If it were cheaper here, overall, to bury the lines, they would. In general it isn't, so they don't.
@Acme Fixer:
Yes, damned annoying. Doesn't mean it isn't also expensive, but when you get right down to it, how did the actual damage affect Joe Average? He had to wait a some seconds longer for his grotty pics, or his e-mail might have arrived a bit late, and so on. In the large scheme of things, it's only somewhat above this morning's commute as a topic of conversation. The only reason we're still talking about it still is that it's fibre, instead of stop signs and mailboxes.
@Steven Knox, kain preacher:
:-D
" "...What's the chances that the department of homeland insecurity slaps these morons with domestic terrorism charges?..."
Somewhere between 'Zero' and 'None.' Idjiits being idjiits isn't terrorism, and never has been - Not even the DHS would try that one on. "
Did they not bring Boston (and elsewhere) to a stand still on the fear of terrorism because someone used flashing lights in a promotional device that did no (and could not) damage to anything?
Perhaps it would be ironic IF IT WERE BASTARD WELL TRUE.
But it isn't.
http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/bl_Charles_Herzfeld.htm
"Why was the ARPAnet started? Most of the early "history" on the subject is wrong. As Director of ARPA at the time, I can tell you our intent. The ARPAnet was not started to create a Command and Control System that would survive a nuclear attack, as many now claim. To build such a system was clearly a major military need, but it was not ARPA's mission to do this; in fact, we would have been severely criticized had we tried. Rather, the ARPAnet came out of our frustration that there were only a limited number of large, powerful research computers in the country, and that many research investigators who should have access to them were geographically separated from them."
m'kay ?
Wasn't that when the local divers tried to obtain copperon the cheap to flog to the scrap merchants?
Chop up and drag uplong lengths of fibre, remove powercable for boosters, tip scrap fibre over side of boat and putt off to sell wire than cost a couple of million to make and lay, for pennies.
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