But you are ignoring the cost of designing, procuring, installing, monitoring, maintaining such a solution for the THOUSANDS of man holes and hand holes in even a small fiber network. The reality is, the types of outages that these things would protect against (intentional damage to the physical fiber) just don't happen often enough to warrant the cost. These types of solutions don't protect against back hoes digging up the fiber, as even if they gave a few minutes of advanced notice, the average telco can't get someone to respond to a site in an hour let alone minutes. On Apr 13, 2009, at 9:05 PM, Peter Beckman wrote:

On Mon, 13 Apr 2009, Shane Ronan wrote:

...

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.

I'm sure more malicious fiber cuts would result in heightened security. If you can put your hand in it, you could put a sensor in it. It wouldn't work everywhere, but it could work even in conduit or just simply inside access points.

A device the size of your fist or smaller could do the monitoring, and would fit in most access points I would guess.

You can't protect it all, and obviously you can't put a camera at every access point (well, maybe you can). You can't stop a determined person from doing anything (like promote networked smart sensors for fiber runs, or setting a small explosion inside an access point). And maybe environmental monitoring of these areas just won't do anything to help. But who knows.

Beckman --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Peter Beckman Internet Guy beckman@angryox.com http://www.angryox.com/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------