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.
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
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
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
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
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
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?
(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!
(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