At 12:50 PM 7/21/2001, up@3.am wrote:

Yes, I can see that; but I imagine you could handle this much the way fiber is handled near the shoreline. Bury it a few feet under the mud or sand.

Keep in mind, too, that every crossing isn't going to be a nice, deep river... I can think of hundreds of cases (and so can you) where the crossing is over a shallow creek or fairly deep ravine (no water at all!) - yet difficult at best to trench it in... so cables, pipelines, etc, ride the bridge... Then your friendly local tropical storm comes along, drops plenty of water, and the bridge washes out. Now what? Reroute everything, of course. Or a tank truck catches fire and destroys the bridge (as happened in Atlanta not long ago - sure, it was I-285, and I don't think any cables rode that bridge), Obviously when routing cables, you have to deal with the cost/benefit ratio. What are the chances of any single point suffering catastrophic failure? How much will it cost to trench it in instead of riding a bridge/tunnel? You make a decision, then you deal with the consequences if you're wrong. More than worry about exactly what method is used for routing cables, I agree with building redundancy. Because no matter how you armor/protect your cables, something CAN occur that'll break through that protection... but if you have a backup in place, routed another way, with automatic failover, you barely notice. More importantly, your customers DON'T notice.