Teeth marks yield clue to widespread internet outage in Canada Here:s a novel cause for an internet outage: a beaver. This story comes from Canada, where CTV News Vancouver yesterday reported that Canadian power company BC Hydro investigated the cause of a June 7 outage that "left many residents of north-western British Columbia without internet, landline and cellular service for more …
This isn't really novel. Rodents etc. have long been the cause of outages. Whether power or data networking.
To really mess things up you need a contractor with an auger: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-61757877
PS, the above outage was five days, not a mere 8 hours.
Too true. I remember back in the early/mid-nineties a shark taking out pretty much the only direct (commercial) Internet cable to the US from Australia. Routing had to be done through SE Asia in a very convoluted manner. Watching BGP go batshit was mildly amusing at the ISP I worked for at the time.
In the mid-1990s, I was an IT contractor at Simplex Cable, which built undersea fiber-optic cables at its plant in Newington, NH. Simplex made an armored cable to resist shark bites in shallow water areas. The issue is undersea fiber-optic cable use repeaters which require electricity. As the cable comes ashore in shallow water, sharks can sense the electric current on the cable and snap at it as if it were prey to eat. Beavers, while not ocean-going rodents, do live in water. The front teeth on a beaver are tough, which the beaver uses for chewing down trees. I suspect if there are areas where fiber-optic cables are run in beaver habitats in the water or close to the ground, they should use armored fiber-optic cable.
What you propose will be a never ending arms race between people building ever more armored cables & Mother Nature making ever more heavily toothed beavers. Eventually we'll see ten ton armored beavers just shoving trees over with teeth the likes last seen on Sabre Toothed Tigers.
I, for one, praise our new ten ton armored beaver overlords. =-)p
"To really mess things up you need a contractor with an auger"
Or a teenager who takes his mother's car without permission one morning, does the favoured teenage trick thing of spinning it out on a bend because he can't drive as well as he thinks he can - but adds the novel twist of completely wiping out a main VM hub providing internet and TV to several thousand people.
For I was one of those several thousand people who was without connectivity for almost a full week as a result while VM rebuilt the hub.
They did compensate me, but they wouldn't give me his name and address. So it was break-even.
Last century I went to the large railroad company HQ to take my annual railroad rules class.
At one point we were going to be shown a safety film, this year's was called "Into Dark Territory!", which was likely about operating on trackage that isn't signaled The intro was in faux-50's TV B&W with dramatic noir music and lightning bolt title lettering down the screen.
Just after that title screen flashed on the monitor with accompanying orchestral flourish, the building went completely dark and quiet, until the emergency lighting came on years/hour/minutes later.
I ended up taking the test sitting on the floor in the hallway under an emergency light. And being let out by security.
This time it was a state trooper who lost control during a pursuit and knocked down a power pole.
Twenty years or so later in my railroad career I was flagging for crews laying fiber by the right-of-way. That's where cable belongs, IMO.
Most notworking issues with networks are caused by Layer 1 issues - not plugged in properly, cable fault, cable break etc.
Sharing layer 1 infra may save some money, but will cause some issues later on, should Mr Murphy decide to take a poke at Layer 1. Yet most telcos will gladly take that risk as having redundant infra will affect their bottom line.
You can pay your ISP for physically-redundant links between your building and their central office, but when someone upstream of your ISP aggregates previously-physically-redundant links into one physical, mega-capacity link for cost savings, you won't know they did it until disaster strikes.
Remember also that when you as a senior manager spec that a service should be cloud-hosted to save money, you are betting that not only will the cloud-hosted service stay up but that every bit of networking between your customers and the cloud host will also stay up and stay relatively fast with it.
This is not a safe bet.
Correct, but when sh^&*t happens, the senior manager will be able to deflect any blame by saying "we're working with our partner <insert cloud and/or telco provider name here> to solve this incident. We'll get back to you when service is restored." That's the beauty of the cloud computing. This is another instance of "nobody has ever been fired for buying..."
Is sparsely populated in a way people who live in the UK or EU cannot begin to comprehend. The least populated areas of say northern Scotland are urban sprawl by comparison.
They're lucky they have fiber at all, it is never going to be worth it to run a separate redundant path.
"[...] took a chance that they could reach the next service station [...]"
How about garage issues an invoice to driver for enough petrol to get to nearest large town on route? Payment guaranteed by some level of government if driver does not pay. Government takes power to recover cost from driver.
Only for emergencies like this. Mitigate what turned out to be a spof.
As OA says Canada is big. It strikes me that things can go wrong with some speed in the middle of nowhere.
Presumably no-one has the manual card entry devices these days as a fallback.
They were fun when I was a petrol cashier with massive queues on a Saturday afternoon. :-(
I think some people damaged the magnetic strip on purpose so it would take a few extra days for payment to be requested from their card each time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card_imprinter
Once when I was paying by credit card at a petrol station, the cashier handed me the slip to sign. I crossed through the blank boxes on the amount before signing. he was most offended. "If I was going to scam you I wouldn't do it like that." he said. Well, I wasn't going to give him the opportunity. When using the paper payment system, always check the amount and make sure any unused boxes are crossed through before signing and returning the slip.
Likewise my UK cards are fully embossed. Issued in 2021.
It's a very random mix of banks. I think Starling were one of the first, along with Monzo (the challenger banks). They were aimed at the yoof who were probably going to shove the details into Apple/Google Pay anyway.
My 2021 credit and debit cards from older banks are both embossed, but I've seen a 2022 HSBC card which is not embossed.
Curiously, the card details are all on the back - the front is just a logo. This means you can capture the name, card number, expiry date and CVV code in a single photograph. This is a bit curious since the entire point of putting the CVV on the back (and not embossing it) was that you were splitting the critical data and seeing/capturing the front face of the card was insufficient to abuse the card.
Presumably HSBC are feeling confident in their real-time fraud detection.
Not necessarily. My Discover card isn't embossed. My Capital One card is. My Chase card isn't.
And my brand-new Truist (used to be SunTrust) bank card isn't, but my elderly Chase bank card is.
The newer cards, credit or debit, tend to not be embossed, the older ones tend to be. My Discover and Chase cards are a year or so old, the Cap One card expires this year. The Truist card is less than six months old, SunTrust just merged with another bank to become Truist and issued all new cards. The Chase debit card expires this year.
It appears that major national and regional banks in the US are moving away from embossed cards.
"Or just carry some cash for emergencies."
If you are traveling a longish distance from home, it's a very good idea to carry enough cash for petrol/travel to get home along with meals at the very least. You might also want money for lodging since bad weather could be why your card isn't working. I expect you might be able to figure out why this is one of my rules. I also keep enough cash on hand to fill the tank and buy necessities. When the internet is out in my small town, all of the business are out as well.
A tree falling on high tension lines in California led to one of the states largest recent fires. A proximate cause was regulations that didn't allow the owner of the lines to clear a sufficient corridor to keep falling trees from hitting the lines. With the regs still in place, transmission line operators are shutting down power when there are high winds forecast. Better a bunch of angry customers than being sued into bankruptcy.
I'm reminded of a story that I hear a while back about a guy who crash-landed his plane in the middle of the Canadian nowhere. He was disoriented, not sure where he was and had no idea how to get to civilisation. Fortunately for him there was a cable pole nearby, so he just chopped it down and waited for the power/telephone/whatever company to come along and investigate the outage.
Beavers are just big squirrels. This site used to track squirrel and similar power outages. He stopped updating the site a few years back.... it's just overwhelming.
Note in THIS case, beaver chewed a tree (that's what they do), NOT the cable.
And in general you do NOT want three separate pole-lines on every street.
> ...railroad ...laying fiber by the right-of-way. That's where cable belongs, IMO.
Maybe better, but... there's a railroad bridge near here, road runs under it. Low bridge. Loudly posted. Nevertheless, at least every year some truck wedges itself under the railroad bridge. (As often as not, telephone bucket truck...)
> That part of Canada Is sparsely populated in a way people who live in the UK or EU cannot begin to comprehend.
Here in coastal Maine, we can guess. While my street is wired, I don't have to go far from home to lose wires and wireless. Above Bangor is increasing wilderness all the way over the border into Quebec.
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