Posted on 08/21/2007 9:14:34 AM PDT by LurkedLongEnough
ISPs in the U.S. experienced a service slowdown Monday after fiber-optic cables near Cleveland were apparently sabotaged by gunfire.
TeliaSonera, which lost the northern leg of its U.S. network to the cut, said that the outage began around 7 p.m. Pacific Time on Sunday night. When technicians pulled up the affected cable, it appeared to have been shot. "Somebody had been shooting with a gun or a shotgun into the cable," said Anders Olausson, a TeliaSonera spokesman.
The damage affected a large span of cable, more than two-thirds of a mile [1.1 km] long, near Cleveland, TeliaSonera said.
The company declined to name the service provider whose lines had been cut, but a source familiar with the situation said the lines are owned by Level 3 Communications. Level 3 could not be reached immediately for comment.
Cogent Communications warned that some customers may be experiencing disruptions because network lines had been cut somewhere between Montville, Ohio, and Cleveland. "Splice crews are currently doing preparation work on the new fiber cable before splicing begins to resolve the outage," Cogent said in a note to customers.
According to Keynote Systems' Internet Pulse Report, Cogent was experiencing significant latency problems on Monday.
The outage caused headaches for Christopher McCoy, a system administrator for a Web hosting company in Atlanta. "This Telia outage is really causing a pain," he wrote in a blog posting. "Telia is one of my companys main network providers, and explaining to your average Webmaster the details and specifics of a fiber break isnt all that easy."
I don’t get your tagline. Is it a reference to the Dan Rather “What’s the frequency, Kenneth?” incident?
That's what I was thinking. Some youngster/youngsters bringing in dove season early.
“I have always been fascinated trying to figure out just how they splice two lengths of fiber-optic cable together and make all those tiny connections work.”
It can be a pain in the keister!
It has gotten much beter but not too long ago it could take an hour to glue, polish and TDR test a single fiber. Of course the more you do it the quicker you get. Now days they have kits that make it much quicker.
We were installing a bunch of multimode (24 fiber) runs about a kilometer of length. The vendor was spooling it off and laid it across what was supposed to be abandonded railroad siding...
An train engine came along and cut the fiber in about 6 places. The vendor was PO’d. At that time Fiber was EXPENSIVE...
Oh, and some Al Gore thrown in too. I love it!
Backhoes Interuptus...
I've seen it but it wasn't his most memorable.
I guess TeliaSonera has never heard of SONET rings? More likely they made a decision to go cheap. All that self-healing fiber-optic ring stuff costs money.
I’ve seen it done before. Basically, there’s a little machine that lines up the two ends of the fiber and then literally melts the two ends together. The amazing thing about it is the junction between the two fibers is nearly lossless after the “weld”.
Well, great, now they know they can disrupt information flow. I wondered what the cause of the overall slowdown was, since many sites were at a crawl, but I had no direct ISP problems.
Terrorists are taking notes, I’m sure.
This is a travesty, IMO. The whole intent of the Internet, at its inception, was to provide redundant, robust data services in the event of major conflict (read: Nulcear War).
Alternate routing should be industry standard, IMO.
“”Somebody had been shooting with a gun or a shotgun into the cable,” said
Anders Olausson, a TeliaSonera spokesman. “
Hmm...maybe a Jihadi has come from his tour of duty in Iraq.
And after seeing how this Jihadi brothers have mucked up the petroleum
and electrical power grids with sabotage...
decided to see if a simple slege-hammer (non-tech) method could be used
to disrupt US infrastructure.
Yeah, I know that’s far-fetched.
But a lot of things sound less far-fetched after the morning of 9-11-2001.
The world is not bozoproof, unfortunately.
You mean Sean Connerys version of High Noon?
Great flick.
L
Kara in “Spock’s Brain” was played by Marj Dusay. Lee Meriwether played Losira in “That Which Survives”.
Try to make something foolproof and the universe just starts supplying a better grade of fools.
Maybe this is the real reason Rove retired. He and Cheney are out shootin’ up fiber optic cables.
It's magic.
Not just magic, but FM.
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