In addition to which, fiber doesn't emit a nice electrical signature that
can be detected easily, making it hard to avoid. Plastic, glass,
fiberglass, kevlar and the other elements of most fiber runs lay invisible
to many detection devices that rely upon metals content or electrical
impulse emission (crosstalk, noise, EMF...) for detection purposes.
Now, some have written that we should encase these things with various
high-strength metals. I'm not willing, as an end consumer, to bear the
increased overall costs being passed to me, because $VBC laid 10,000 miles
(16 000 km) of protectively-encased fiber. Costs would be staggering. In
You wouldn't need to encase it. Bury a little bit of copper with it,
and blast RF out of it (think of it is a locater service).
--msa
I was under the impression that fiber trunks used to be buried (circa 15
years ago) with a copper tracer in them. Then there was some good reason
why they were no longer done that way. Like corrosion or something.
Deepak Jain
AiNET
Speaking of fiber cuts, there's an MCI/Worldcom fiber run in downtown
Houston, TX that's out. The location is at Walker and Louisiana as best I
can tell, which just so happens to be in front of the building my office
is in. There's a long line of MCI Worldcom trucks and a crew out there
now. Several multi-homed customers of UUNet in Houston have their UUNet
links down. I'll send more info as I have it.
Both Qwest and BBN/GTEi have POP's in this building, but they appear to be
unaffected. UUNet's main Houston POP is a few hundred feet down
Louisiana.
With all the construction in this area of downtown, I'm frankly shocked
that this hasn't happend until now.
It would also be a lot of fun to see all the gory details about how
exactly things got cut, and what they had to do to fix it. Maybe it was
easy, maybe they ran out of slack in the cable and needed to wait hours
for more cable to arrive, maybe the one guy who knows how to fix things is
on vacation, etc.
I spoke to someone at MCI WorldCom Fiber Security who claims they have an
organized repository for stuff like this on their intranet. If you're a
customer, they said the only way to find out about current outages is to
call the MFS/Brooks/whatever trouble number you have, or try to get your
sales rep to get post-mortem info if your outage was long enough to
trigger SLA credits.