KIRO TV has a report concerning the fiber cuts targeting a particular
fiber route in the Northwest US. It has been been disrupted four times
in the last two years, not by backhoes, but by someone entering a
fiber hut.
North Sound 911 Service Repeatedly Targeted
by Chris Halsne KIRO 7 Eyewitness News Investigative Reporter
[...]
This person hasn't been randomly chopping entire bundles of cables, but
rather he or she is using surgical precision to black out one particular
911 emergency call center.
Early in the morning of Sept. 3, some criminal strolled into a Qwest
Telecommunications server station with tools in hand and carefully sliced
one strand of wire.
[...]
Operators couldn't help but feel a sense of dj vu. KIRO Team 7
Investigators have learned that someone intentionally rerouted, cut or
altered 911 service to Whatcom County on three occasions in two years.
Each time the criminal entered the same Qwest fiber optics "hut" to create
the chaos.
[...]
The article says there were three disruptions prior
to this most recent event. It goes on to say:
Early in the morning of Sept. 3, some criminal strolled into a
Qwest Telecommunications server station with tools in hand
and carefully sliced one strand of wire.
For the next 8 hours and 41 minutes Whatcom County, Bellingham
and northern Snohomish County lost all telecommunications.
Even 911 service was disconnected.
You'd think after three previous disruptions, that Qwest would
have enabled some form of redundancy.
The Washington State PUC doesn't appear to be providing
very good oversight.
Farmington, NM doesn't have any redundancy either. Two types
of problems seem to drive the 3 or 4 outages in the last few years:
- electrcity cut-off at fiber regen sites because no one pays
the rural electric co-ops
- target shooting of splice boxes
Even though Qwest is the ILEC, you can't really blame the outages
on them -- they don't own the fiber route or huts, nor do they
have any way to deal with Cousin Jimmy's rattlesnake gun.
I hate to see what would happen if the damage was intentional...