On Mon, May 13, 2019 at 11:48:02PM -0500, frnkblk@iname.com wrote:
One of my takeaways from that article was that burying fiber underground could likely have avoided many/most of these fiber cuts, though I???m not familiar enough with the terrain to know how feasible that is.
I suspect that may not be possible in (parts of) Florida. However, even in places where it's possible, fiber installation is sometimes miserably executed. Like my neighborhood. A couple of years ago, Verizon decided to finally bring FIOS in. They put in the appropriate calls to utility services, who dutifully marked all the existing power/cable/gas/etc. lines and then their contractors (or sub-sub-contractors) showed up. The principle outcome of their efforts quickly became clear, as one Comcast cable line after another was severed. Not a handful, not even dozens: well over a hundred. They managed to cut mine in three places, which was truly impressive. (Thanks for the extended outage, Verizon.) After this had gone on for a month, Comcast caught on and took the expedient route of just rolling a truck every morning. They'd park at the end of the road and just wait for the service calls that they knew were coming. Of course Comcast's lines were not the only victims of this incompetence and negligence. Amusingly, sometimes Verizon had to send its own repair crews for their copper lines. There's a lot more but let me skip to the end result. After inflicting months of outages on everyone, after tearing up lots of lawns, after all of this, many of the fiber conduits that are allegedly underground: aren't. ---rsk