Re: MCI WorldCom fiber cut - Syracuse, NY
Has anyone come to the conclusion that there might be a market for titanium-reinforced innerduct? Add up the yearly costs of outages for the average provider and the high costs of indestructable conduit make more sense. At 02:02 PM 10/5/99 -0400, Scott Drassinower wrote:
MCI WorldCom claims that they have located a fiber cut in or near Syracuse, NY (300+ miles northwest of NYC and White Plains) that is the cause of the outage. They say crews have been dispatched.
We had several MCI WorldCom circuits go out of service at about 12:40 EDT. Some of the circuits are totally within WorldCom's fiber network, some have endpoints on Bell Atlantic's network. All are in the NYC area.
Unconfirmed by WorldCom, but apparently this cut has taken out two OC-48s.
It's very interesting (and seemingly absurd) that to go 25 miles south, we first must go 300 miles in the totally opposite direction.
-- Scott M. Drassinower scottd@cloud9.net Cloud 9 Consulting, Inc. White Plains, NY +1 914 696-4000 http://www.cloud9.net
Michael Heller Sr. Systems Engineer Earthweb, Inc. 212.448.4175 mikeh@earthweb.com
On Tue, 5 Oct 1999, Michael Heller wrote:
Has anyone come to the conclusion that there might be a market for titanium-reinforced innerduct?
Actually I think theres a market for armed guards to patrol fiber routes, with orders to destroy backhoes on sight (of course the operator would be given oh, 10 seconds to vacate the vehicle before its reduced to scrap). -Dan
I find it interesting that we don't hear about more accidental gas explosions and water main breaks from backhoes. Are the blueprints and posted warnings more detailed or is there more fiber than utility pipe in the ground? Michael Heller Sr. Systems Engineer Earthweb, Inc. 212.448.4175 mikeh@earthweb.com On Tue, 5 Oct 1999, Dan Hollis wrote:
On Tue, 5 Oct 1999, Michael Heller wrote:
Has anyone come to the conclusion that there might be a market for titanium-reinforced innerduct?
Actually I think theres a market for armed guards to patrol fiber routes, with orders to destroy backhoes on sight (of course the operator would be given oh, 10 seconds to vacate the vehicle before its reduced to scrap).
-Dan
I think this is just a factor of human beings. People are more cautious about hitting gas or electric (hitting a gas or underground electric line will ruin your day for the rest of your rapidly-shortening life). If you hit a telephone line with your backhoe... oh, what, you mean there's people affected by that all over the country? People are more cautious around things that will kill them. Perhaps this is a good reason to use that Titanium sheathing that someone else mentioned... maybe copper would be better. Copper is an excellent conductor of electricity. We could "protect" the bundles from animals (ostensibly) by pumping some juice along them. And if the animals happen to be running backhoes, they're protected from them too. D At 07:27 PM 10/5/99 -0400, Mike Heller wrote:
I find it interesting that we don't hear about more accidental gas explosions and water main breaks from backhoes. Are the blueprints and posted warnings more detailed or is there more fiber than utility pipe in the ground?
Michael Heller Sr. Systems Engineer Earthweb, Inc. 212.448.4175 mikeh@earthweb.com
On Tue, 5 Oct 1999, Dan Hollis wrote:
On Tue, 5 Oct 1999, Michael Heller wrote:
Has anyone come to the conclusion that there might be a market for titanium-reinforced innerduct?
Actually I think theres a market for armed guards to patrol fiber routes, with orders to destroy backhoes on sight (of course the operator would be given oh, 10 seconds to vacate the vehicle before its reduced to scrap).
-Dan
On Tue, 5 Oct 1999, Derek J. Balling wrote:
I think this is just a factor of human beings. People are more cautious about hitting gas or electric (hitting a gas or underground electric line will ruin your day for the rest of your rapidly-shortening life). If you hit a telephone line with your backhoe... oh, what, you mean there's people affected by that all over the country?
Yep, that is why you don't see cut's along the old wiltel (now Worldcom) network. If you see a sign saying "High pressure natural gas" you do not dig, if you see a sign saying "Fiber cable" you dig carefully. I must admit, I have done some backhoe work and I dig carefully next to fiber, but don't get near utilities. :-(
<> Nathan Stratton Tricetel Consulting http://www.tricetel.net nathan@tricetel.net http://www.robotics.net nathan@robotics.net
On Tue, 5 Oct 1999, Mike Heller wrote:
I find it interesting that we don't hear about more accidental gas explosions and water main breaks from backhoes. Are the blueprints and posted warnings more detailed or is there more fiber than utility pipe in the ground?
My Dad worked for a Natural Gas Transmission company long ago, and all the cool pictures I saw of flames shooting out of the ground usually didn't involve a backhoe. I say put the cable in the titanium tube another poster spoke of earlier, and pressurize the tube with something highly flammable/combustible while you're at it. Maybe natural gas to power backup generators at each of the fiber landing points. People don't like digging where things can go "Boom". Charles
Michael Heller Sr. Systems Engineer Earthweb, Inc. 212.448.4175 mikeh@earthweb.com
On Tue, 5 Oct 1999, Dan Hollis wrote:
On Tue, 5 Oct 1999, Michael Heller wrote:
Has anyone come to the conclusion that there might be a market for titanium-reinforced innerduct?
Actually I think theres a market for armed guards to patrol fiber routes, with orders to destroy backhoes on sight (of course the operator would be given oh, 10 seconds to vacate the vehicle before its reduced to scrap).
-Dan
On Tue, Oct 05, 1999 at 10:55:34PM -0400, Charles Sprickman wrote:
I say put the cable in the titanium tube another poster spoke of earlier, and pressurize the tube with something highly flammable/combustible while you're at it. Maybe natural gas to power backup generators at each of the fiber landing points.
You're right, I think putting people's lives in danger so that my downloads don't get interrupted is definitely the way to go. --Adam
At 01:23 PM 10/6/99 -0400, Adam D . McKenna wrote:
On Tue, Oct 05, 1999 at 10:55:34PM -0400, Charles Sprickman wrote:
I say put the cable in the titanium tube another poster spoke of earlier, and pressurize the tube with something highly flammable/combustible while you're at it. Maybe natural gas to power backup generators at each of the fiber landing points.
You're right, I think putting people's lives in danger so that my downloads don't get interrupted is definitely the way to go.
(a) It's only in danger if they're careless, and (b) It's Darwinism. You're just helping along natural selection. Not to mention (c) Porn makes the net go round. If people can't get their porn, they don't need net access. If they don't need net access, we're all out of jobs. If we're jobless, we're homeless and without food and we starve. Now if it comes down to some idiot in a backhoe dying quickly in a blinding explosion or ME dying slowly of starvation, I vote for the dude in the backhoe. ;-)
On Wed, Oct 06, 1999 at 10:52:29AM -0700, Derek J. Balling wrote:
You're right, I think putting people's lives in danger so that my downloads don't get interrupted is definitely the way to go.
(a) It's only in danger if they're careless, and (b) It's Darwinism. You're just helping along natural selection.
Not to mention
(c) Porn makes the net go round. If people can't get their porn, they don't need net access. If they don't need net access, we're all out of jobs. If we're jobless, we're homeless and without food and we starve. Now if it comes down to some idiot in a backhoe dying quickly in a blinding explosion or ME dying slowly of starvation, I vote for the dude in the backhoe.
I think that if you really want to make people think twice about digging then you should put a dollar amount on every outage and sue the construction company for the damage. Maybe this is an unrealistic proposition but I think it is definitely a better solution than putting the equivalent of a land mine around your wire. --Adam
I think that if you really want to make people think twice about digging then you should put a dollar amount on every outage and sue the construction company for the damage. Maybe this is an unrealistic proposition but I think it is definitely a better solution than putting the equivalent of a land mine around your wire.
I know some telcos do this already. When I worked for GTE (years ago) , we had this construction guy calling into the call-center asking when the "call before you dig" guy would be there. We had no idea (I worked in the billing department at the time), and simply referred him back to the Dig-#.... he called about 10 times in 20 minutes (literally) and finally he said to the last rep "Fuck it, I'm digging..." About 20 minutes later, we started getting "Idiot Overflow"[1] calls looking for the repair department, wanting to report outages, all in the general vicinity of where this guy had been calling from. We called over to repair who said that "I think there's a cable cut somewhere." We were able to tell him immediately where the cut was simply by referencing the backhoe guy's information. :) Repair called us back later to thank us, and to let us know that the construction guy was getting a VERY large bill for the repair costs. Now, if the telco comes out and marks the lines, you dig elsewhere and hit a line, the telco is on their own, which only makes sense. D [1] Idiot Overflow -- when people can't get through to one department, or they don't like the hold time, so they call a completely unrelated department on a different 800 number hoping that somehow we can perform feats of black magic to do what the other department does.
[ On Wednesday, October 6, 1999 at 13:30:48 (-0700), Derek J. Balling wrote: ]
Subject: Re: MCI WorldCom fiber cut - Syracuse, NY
[1] Idiot Overflow -- when people can't get through to one department, or they don't like the hold time, so they call a completely unrelated department on a different 800 number hoping that somehow we can perform feats of black magic to do what the other department does.
Sometimes the idiots are the ones in the other department that are supposed to be answering the phones. I've more than once encountered help desks that refuse to answer the phone when there's something bad happening in their department, but will answer inside transfers. Other times the only way I've been able to get a supervisor is by asking some other poor helpless soul in a different department to transfer me to one. Sometimes though it's just that the hold music is so bad that if I didn't hang up and try the inside transfer trick one more second of it would force me to try to crawl through the wires and do unspeakable things to the first person I find on the other end! ;-) -- Greg A. Woods +1 416 218-0098 VE3TCP <gwoods@acm.org> <robohack!woods> Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>
(c) Porn makes the net go round. If people can't get their porn, they don't need net access. If they don't need net access, we're all out of jobs. If we're jobless, we're homeless and without food and we starve. Now if it comes down to some idiot in a backhoe dying quickly in a blinding explosion or ME dying slowly of starvation, I vote for the dude in the backhoe.
I can just see the sign: Warning Underground Fiber Cutting fiber may be dangerous to your supply of Porn and may cause network engineers to starve. - Forrest W. Christian (forrestc@imach.com) KD7EHZ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- iMach, Ltd., P.O. Box 5749, Helena, MT 59604 http://www.imach.com Solutions for your high-tech problems. (406)-442-6648 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
On Tue, 5 Oct 1999, Michael Heller wrote:
Has anyone come to the conclusion that there might be a market for titanium-reinforced innerduct? Add up the yearly costs of outages for the average provider and the high costs of indestructable conduit make more sense.
Anyone wanna figure the odds that once production of this starts, and metal cost drop due to volume alloy production titanium-reinforced buckets for the evil hoes will become available? --- As folks might have suspected, not much survives except roaches, and they don't carry large enough packets fast enough... --About the Internet and nuclear war.
participants (10)
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Adam D . McKenna -
Charles Sprickman -
Christopher E. Brown -
Dan Hollis -
Derek J. Balling -
Forrest W. Christian -
Michael Heller -
Mike Heller
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Nathan Stratton -
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