I'm not sure why this sounds so surprising or impressive... given g$vt budgets. Monitoring software using a pair of fibers in your bundle. OTDR or similar digital diagnostics. You detect a loss, you figure out how many feet away it is. You look at your map. A simpler way to do it (if you don't mind burning lots of fiber pairs) would be to loop up a pair of fibers (or add a reflectance source every 1000 ft or so -- spliced into the cable). You can figure out to within a thousand feet once you know WHICH set of loops has died. Given it almost always involved construction crews, you drive until you see backhoes for your final approximation. If I were the gov't I'd have originally opted for #2, and then moved to #1. "Seconds" is just a function of how far away the responding agency's personnel ( monitoring the loop ) were from the cut. Obviously we are talking about a few miles tops. Plenty of people used to have a single pair in each bundle for "testing". Its relatively trivial to make that a test pair live. This is all predicated on you actually keeping your toplogy up-to-date. Deepak Jain AiNET Charles Wyble wrote:
Joel Jaeggli wrote:
It's pretty trivial if know where all the construction projects on your path are...
How so? Setup OTDR traces and watch them?
I've seen this happen on a university campus several times. no black helicopters were involved.
Care to expand on the methodology used? A campus network is a lot different then a major metro area.