http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/30/AR2009053002114_pf.html
Not sure if I fully believe the article. Responding to a fiber cut in seconds?
I suppose it's possible if $TLA had people monitoring the construction from across the street, and they were in communication with the NOC.
I sent this to all of our transport people to.. Was quite curious as to
what they'd use for this.
However, they are the federal government - so anything is possible.
It's pretty trivial if know where all the construction projects on your
path are...
I've seen this happen on a university campus several times. no black
helicopters were involved.
joel
Charles Wyble wrote:
Joel Jaeggli wrote:
It's pretty trivial if know where all the construction projects on your
path are...
How so? Setup OTDR traces and watch them?
I've seen this happen on a university campus several times. no black
helicopters were involved.
Care to expand on the methodology used? A campus network is a lot different then a major metro area.
I'm not sure why this sounds so surprising or impressive... given g$vt budgets.
Monitoring software using a pair of fibers in your bundle. OTDR or similar digital diagnostics. You detect a loss, you figure out how many feet away it is. You look at your map.
A simpler way to do it (if you don't mind burning lots of fiber pairs) would be to loop up a pair of fibers (or add a reflectance source every 1000 ft or so -- spliced into the cable). You can figure out to within a thousand feet once you know WHICH set of loops has died.
Given it almost always involved construction crews, you drive until you see backhoes for your final approximation.
If I were the gov't I'd have originally opted for #2, and then moved to #1.
"Seconds" is just a function of how far away the responding agency's personnel ( monitoring the loop ) were from the cut. Obviously we are talking about a few miles tops.
Plenty of people used to have a single pair in each bundle for "testing". Its relatively trivial to make that a test pair live. This is all predicated on you actually keeping your toplogy up-to-date.
Deepak Jain
AiNET
Charles Wyble wrote:
Charles Wyble wrote:
Joel Jaeggli wrote:
It's pretty trivial if know where all the construction projects on your
path are...How so? Setup OTDR traces and watch them?
When you lose link on every pair in a bundle, but don't lose any of the
buildings you're serving via diverse paths, you have a pretty good idea
what happened. Knowing which of the three construction projects on that
path is likely to be digging a trench is a facilities issue.
I've seen this happen on a university campus several times. no black
helicopters were involved.Care to expand on the methodology used? A campus network is a lot
different then a major metro area.
Given the location the guys in the blacks suvs likely have at least
situational awareness of all of the contruction projects in their
immediate vicinity. they don't have to monitor everyone's cable, just
their own and near instantaneous response implies proximity so it may
well be more akin to a campus network.
In a message written on Mon, Jun 01, 2009 at 03:40:31PM -0700, Charles Wyble wrote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/30/AR2009053002114_pf.html
Not sure if I fully believe the article. Responding to a fiber cut in
seconds?
Folks who dig call "Miss Utility" (in Virginia, anyway) befor they
dig to have folks come out and spray paint where everything is
lcoated. On the back end, folks with cables in the ground subscribe
to a feed of address information to know if they should go out and
mark cables.
I have no doubt the men in black SUV's have a feed of this data,
and thus know when someone is going to be digging near their cable.
Indeed, I can think of at least two instances where I was out
surveying fiber digs where black SUV's seemed to be across the
street the entire time.
With the location having features like a metro tunnel under a US
Army "classified" microwave tower it would not surprise me that
they have someone in the area watching.
I suspect they were waiting nearby, and when it went down went in
not to tell folks they cut something, but rather to tell them that
they cut nothing. Wink wink. Nudge nudge.
Joel Jaeggli wrote:
Charles Wyble wrote:
Joel Jaeggli wrote:
It's pretty trivial if know where all the construction projects on your
path are...How so? Setup OTDR traces and watch them?
When you lose link on every pair in a bundle, but don't lose any of the
buildings you're serving via diverse paths, you have a pretty good idea
what happened. Knowing which of the three construction projects on that
path is likely to be digging a trench is a facilities issue.
Right. So why the "near instant" response time. If it's a diverse path, one would imagine that they could respond in a few hours or a day and not have any impact.
The fact that they are so closely monitoring the construction and wanting to fix it that fast seems a bit over the top for redundant systems.
I've seen this happen on a university campus several times. no black
helicopters were involved.Care to expand on the methodology used? A campus network is a lot
different then a major metro area.Given the location the guys in the blacks suvs likely have at least
situational awareness of all of the contruction projects in their
immediate vicinity.
One would hope. Though given the archaic nature of many govt systems, that could involve a lot of manual paper pulling... or are the bid/reward/permit systems all automated on the east coast? 
they don't have to monitor everyone's cable, just
their own and near instantaneous response implies proximity so it may
well be more akin to a campus network.
True.
The fact that they are so closely monitoring the construction and wanting to fix it that fast seems a bit over the top for redundant systems.
Even despite what we saw recently in the SF bay area?
If black helicopters are involved, I suspect this is about par on the paranoia scale.
Right. So why the "near instant" response time. If it's a diverse path,
one would imagine that they could respond in a few hours or a day and
not have any impact.
Just a guess, but: A cut cable is one thing. A cut cable in which people
wearing different suits and driving a different brand of SUV might splice in
a fiber tap is something altogether different.
I do feel this might be the last post from Mr Pooser. 
Your on to them it seems. 
A very interesting idea. I imagine it wouldn't be hard for foreign actors to get access to the data feed of construction, observe for signs of a cut and then splice in a tap.
Though wouldn't that tap be found via the real response team?
Dave Pooser wrote:
Extra budgets, job creation. Knowing ahead of time where and when work is
going to be done (easily found out), have someone around the corner at a
Starbucks so they can jump into action if/when something goes down.
Just because you have a redundant path doesn't mean you shouldn't get the
broken path repaired ASAP. Maybe there are only two paths. If the other
goes down, and something happens and the Gov't can't mobilize in time,
something bad happens. It's a perfect storm to be sure, but when you have
the lives of 300 million people at stake, I appreciate the diligence.
Joel Jaeggli wrote:
Given the location the guys in the blacks suvs likely have at least
situational awareness of all of the contruction projects in their
immediate vicinity.
This has to be the most backwards way of dealing with this problem. They know exactly where the construction is taking place - the plans are filed with the local municipality and all the relevant agencies have access. Why do they "watch" and "monitor" rather than proactively go out and say "watch out, there's an unmarked cable here" and keep them from cutting the cable in the first place? If these cables are THAT important, I'd think it would be critical to keep them from getting cut in the first place, rather than rushing out to fix them "within 24 hours". They could send guys out in white jumpsuits and hard hats and the backhoe operators would just assume it was normal bureaucracy at work (oops, we forgot to mark those cables on your map) rather than sooper sekrit black fiber that no one is supposed to know about - until they cut into it and the black SUVs show up and then they DO know about it - more than they need to know.
jc
*snicker*
You ever been to a construction site?
Charles Wyble wrote:
I do feel this might be the last post from Mr Pooser.
Your on to them it seems.
A very interesting idea. I imagine it wouldn't be hard for foreign
actors to get access to the data feed of construction, observe for signs
of a cut and then splice in a tap.Though wouldn't that tap be found via the real response team?
No. And here's why: If you're a naughty foreign intelligence team, and
you know your stuff, you already know where some of the cables you'd
really like a tap on are buried. When you hear of a construction project
that might damage one, you set up your innocuous white panel truck
somewhere else, near a suitable manhole. When the construction guy with
a backhoe chops the cable (and you may well slip him some money to do
so), *then* you put your tap in, elsewhere, with your actions covered by
the downtime at the construction site. That's why the guys in the SUVs
are in such a hurry, because they want to close the window of time in
which someone can be tapping the cable elsewhere.
At least that's what I heard. I read it somewhere on the internet.
Definitely. Not at all a sneaky person. No sir.
Dave W
At least I'm in Britain. *Slightly* harder for the NSA to make me
disappear 
Dig Safe, Miss Utility, etc. notify potential dig impacted entities when
activity is occurring around their assets and coordinate the marking of the
utilities and start of construction in proximity to the targeted dig zone.
This is why calling the state utility locator services is the law
(everywhere that I'm aware of). The government isn't exempt from these
notifications FWIW. The programs may have a slight tweak in the national
capitol area.
Best,
-M<
What you're likely interested in is TSP:
This is something that is placed on your service when it's ordered and alters the design and engineering of the services.
- Jared
Elmar K. Bins wrote:
Why do they "watch" and "monitor" rather than proactively go out and say "watch out, there's an unmarked cable here" and keep them from cutting the cable in the first place?
*snicker*You ever been to a construction site?
Yes. We have a number here to call "Before You Dig" and they send people out to mark where underground utilities are. It would be trivially easy for one more set of jump-suited and hard-hat-wearing people to show up during this phase of the project and mark one more line. For the most part the construction teams don't know and don't care who is marking the lines or who is responsible for each, they just want the lines marked (location and type of line - gas, electric, telco) so they can avoid cutting them. In this way the marking team would be "undercover" and the previously unmarked/unmapped line would be No Big Deal. When an unmarked line is cut and black SUVs show up (the opposite of "undercover"), the line becomes A Big Deal which is the opposite of what is intended.
jc
In my experience they are required not only to mark the line, but to identify it with the initials of the owner.
They usually hand out tin foil hats to the dig crew. A clear give away
and easy to spot too.
Next?