Security by obscurity is not viable for the long-term.
Amen. This whole industry is littered with NDAs and such which only keep honest people honest. There is _nothing_ stopping a malicious individual (or group of acting collaboratively but independently) from getting hired to a subcontractor that does fiber digs/maintenance that does work for one or more telecom companies. They get access to all the maps they need (either from the subcontractor's internal resources or from the customer [telecom company]). They assemble the pretty little PDFs and then move on to the next contractor/company and continue. Lather, rinse, repeat. For extra fun, extend to other utilities. Or, borrowing from Wall Street (the movie), work for a janitorial service that cleans the offices of these guys. How many people _really_ lock their mapping stations at the end of each day and how long does it take to circumvent it? The PUCs and local governments are still the best source because all the digs have to be permitted and for existing DPW conduit, the DPW knows where everything is -- because they get paid for it. A customer recently started mounting all their telecom gear (MUXes, etc) behind bullet resistent/bomb resistent walls because they determined that since their hot-spare equipment was mounted near their live gear, that if someone took a gun (or similar) and shot up their telecom wall it would take longer to replace (acquire, resplice and reassemble) what was lost than if the fiber to the building (which already came in from several places) was cut. These are guys who already had telecom gear in several different parts of their building. You can easily extend this need to encasing all conduits and power generation gear in similarly protected surroundings. It only takes a natural disaster, power outage or fiber outage to really know what services are truly critical and which are just believed to be. Fortunately, the vast majority of commercially reasonable installations really never get tested that way. Deepak Jain AiNET