This all implies that the majority of fiber is in "tunnels" that can be monitored. In my experience, almost none of it is in tunnels. In NYC, it's usually buried in conduits directly under the street, with no access, except through the man holes which are located about every 500 feet. In LA, a large amount of the fiber is direct bored under the streets, with access from hand holes and splice boxes located in the grassy areas between the street and the side walks. Along train tracks, the fiber is buried in conduits which are direct buried in the direct along side the train tracks, with hand holes every 1000 feet or so. In any of these scenarios, especially in the third, where the fiber might run through a rural area with no road access and no cellphone coverage. Simply walk through the woods to the train tracks, put open a hand hole and snip, snip, snip, fiber cut. Shane Ronan On Apr 13, 2009, at 5:54 PM, Peter Beckman wrote:
On Mon, 13 Apr 2009, chris.ranch@nokia.com wrote:
I get the feeling you haven't deployed or operated large networks.
Nope.
You never did say what the multiplier was. How many miles or detection nodes there were. Think millions. The number that popped into my head when thinking of active detection measures for the physical network is $billions.
It depends on where you want to deploy it and how many miles you want to protect. I was thinking along the lines of $1.5 million for 1000 miles of tunnel, equipment only. It assumes existing maintenance crews would replace sensors that break or go offline, and that those expenses already exist.
All for a couple of minutes advanced notice of an outage? Would it reduce the risk? No. Would it reduce the MTBF or MTTR? No. Of all outages, how often does this scenario (or one that would trigger your alarm) occur? I'm sure it's down on the list.
What if you had 5 minutes of advanced notice that something was happening in or near one of your Tunnels that served hundreds of thousands of people and businesses and critical infrastructure? Could you get someone on site to stop it? Maybe. Is it worth it? Maybe.
Given my inexperience with large networks, maybe fiber cuts and outages due to vandals, backhoes and other physical disruptions are just what we hear about in the news, and that it isn't worth the expense to monitor for those outages. If so, my idea seems kind of silly.
SLA's account for force de majure (including sabotage), so I really doubt there will be any credits. In fact, there will likely be an uptick on spending as those who really need nines build multi-provider multi- path diversity. Here come the microwave towers!
*laugh* Thank goodness for standardized GIS data. :-)
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