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 company’s main network providers, and explaining to your average Webmaster the details and specifics of a fiber break isn’t all that easy."
Either the ChiComs or an irate wife who is sick of her husband visiting Babes.com.
Sounds like someone who knew what he was doing, probably a upset employee.
Oh, to be a teenager again.
Talk about high-tech 21st-century sabotage! This is either Al Qaeda’s latest strategy or China testing out it’s asymmetric warfare capabilities.
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.
Telia and Cogent, being very cheap wholesale bandwidth providers, did not spend the cash to have a backup, alternate route; and were thus caught out by this problem.
Level3, my provider, has a fully meshed architecture and it would take 2 or more simultaneous outages to cause such a problem, and, it would be localized to one area.
Seriously, if that happened in a hundred well-chosen spots simultaneously around the country, what would be the effect?
“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”
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It looked easy enough when Sean Connery did it in “Outland.”
Here in South Texas we have lost more than one fiber due to Dove/Quail Hunters. We have installed a triple shielded fiber that may do the trick. But I doubt it.
We put about 1000’ underground and then it got cut by a fence builder.
It happens and it can take a while to repair.
You know who’s fault. That darned George. Always busy.
“Level3, my provider, has a fully meshed architecture and it would take 2 or more simultaneous outages to cause such a problem, and, it would be localized to one area.”
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Then it’s good to know we can get some payoff for all those six-inch wide “cable cuts” chopped into streets all over the land that we had to endure during the nineties.
Shoot at the live wires to short them out and pull up what they can steal.
Not copper? Walk away and look for something else to steal.
How many other people besides you and me have seen “Outland”?
So, it would take both of these guys... gotcha.
I might lose that item on eBay I have my eye on.
Maybe it’s a plot by Ebay to get people to stop “sniping’ (pun intended) and bid earlier.
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