without pilots... or a maintenance manager!

Speaking of which, seeing this kind of question, from a VP at a company in the submarine cable business, would sure make me leery of leasing fiber from them, if there's an alternative.  Now, one would not necessarily expect a VP of Business Development to know all the details of network management - but seems to me that he's basically advertising that he's learned about cable breaks from irate customers, rather than being forewarned by his operations team that "you're about to get a bunch of irate calls."

Heck, back in the old days (I was at BBN designing network management for the original Defense Data Network) - we knew how to instrument our networks, and design for redundancy & diverse routing.  Boy did we have egg on our face when a backhoe took out all the connectivity to the Northeast.  We detected the outage just fine - but we (and lots of other folks) were all caught short to discover that AT&T Long Lines routed all of our "redundant" circuits through the SAME fiber bundle.  I expect there are others here who remember that debacle.

Miles Fidelman

It sounds like you don’t have an experienced fiber optic network engineer on the project yet. There is much more to facilities monitoring then just checking for disruption. I recommend that you either retain a consulting engineer or employ one during development. I’m sure operators here are happy to share their ideas, but you will need some expertise in fiber infrastructure to make intelligent decisions about optics, wavelengths, in-band versus out-of-band administration, and a slew of other topics. 

Doing this without experienced engineering help is like starting an airline without pilots :-)

-mel via cell

On Jun 8, 2020, at 11:24 AM, Rod Beck <rod.beck@unitedcablecompany.com> wrote:



Hi,

My colleague and I may be running a new dark fiber network in the Northeast.

We need an outsourced NOC to monitor for fiber cuts and serve as a contact point for customers.

Am I wrong in believing that there should be a way of lighting a single pair in the cable and then monitoring it for signal disruption? It is not a perfect solution, but arguably better than learning that the cable has been damaged from an irate customer.

Best to take any replies off the message board.

Thanks.

Regards,

Roderick.

Roderick Beck

VP of Business Development

United Cable Company

www.unitedcablecompany.com

New York City & Budapest

rod.beck@unitedcablecompany.com

Budapest: 36-70-605-5144

NJ: 908-452-8183

-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works. 
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why. 
In our lab, theory and practice are combined: 
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown