On Feb 2, 2010, at 6:36 PM, Bret Clark wrote:
Good point...so if the cut is in the middle of nowhere without easy access...then how the hell did it get cut? Malicious?
Some hikers were lost in the desert and tossed down some fiber, waiting for a backhoe to show up and save them, but it was confused by the scent of a much longer, juicier piece....
Matt Simmons wrote:
And in an open desert, back hoes can smell fiber from miles away.
On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 3:27 PM, Bill Stewart [1]<nonobvious@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 12:04 AM, [2]<charles@knownelement.com> wrote:
That is one long protect path. Yikes.
There be mountains in the way, with deserts in between, and not a lot of people to justify diversity or railroads and highways to run it along. Not many carriers have more than one fiber route across Arizona and New Mexico, especially for the newer high-capacity fibers (i.e. built this millennium, after the financial excesses of the 90s.) I'm no longer current on what routes are being used by what carriers, but if you don't have two routes across northern Arizona ( I-10/I-40, with restoration routes like Barstow->LasVegas->Flagstaff->Phoenix), then the next alternative is Barstow->LasVegas->SaltLakeCity->Denver, at which point some carriers have routes down to Phoenix via Tucumcari or Amarillo, and the rest are going to go through Dallas, and anybody who doesn't have the LasVegas->SLC route is going to use Sacramento->SLC->Denver, possibly also including San Jose, depending on what routes they've got across California.
So, yeah, instead of the nice short 2200-mile restoration routes you can use if SF->Seattle fails, cable cuts in the Southwest can be really long... -- ---- Thanks; Bill
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References
1. mailto:nonobvious@gmail.com 2. mailto:charles@knownelement.com
--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb