Major fiber cut in Tyson's Corner area

Avi Freedman freedman at avi.netaxs.com
Tue Apr 13 21:56:55 UTC 1999


Paul Ferguson (ferguson at cisco.com) wrote:

: For what it's worth:

: I just heard on the local news that 3 fiber optic cables, as well as
: one large copper bundle was cut in the Tyson's Corner area (Northern
: Virginia). No idea what impact it may have on net traffic, although one
: fiber strand was reported as belonging to MCI.

: For those who may not know, MAE-East is in the Tysons Corner vicinity.

: - paul

In one area, in particular (which affects CAIS, Servint, and one of 
netaxs's POPs) -

>From MFS -

        "The YF system between 81b and q37 is still down; their techs are
        still working on it."

        The last update was at 4pm, which said that due to fact that
        Bell Atlantic owns the duct in which the accident occurred, this
        could be an extended outage.  The outage was caused by a company
        called Fishell.  They were boring next to the BA duct and hit
        the fiber line multiple times and in multiple locations.

        There are currently 41 DS3's and 1 OC3 down.  He didn't know who
        the OC3 belonged to.  Earlier today, an OC12 belonging to L3 was
        down, but it has now been restored.

Then from MFS -

        The cut is much more involved than was thought previously.  MFS
        fiber guys went to the site to find the cables covered in
        concrete, and mixed in with the whole BA damaged duct.  It
        looks like right now MFS is going to have to wait until BA fixes
        the duct before they can even attempt to fix the fiber.

        At 12:30 this afternoon, there was an estimated ETA of 2 to 3
        hours downtime.  That's now been changed to read an "extended
        downtime".

        The master ticket number is 412 573.

So they managed to bore into the duct then fill it with concrete.
Now, Bell is fine (and has dual-entrance around the problem), so as 
you can imagine, they do NOT want to let MFS un-conrete the duct and
repair.  Fun fun.

Still, apparently 6861 Elm St, Vienna, VA, with at least TWO full-up OC48s
of capacity, appears not to have dual-entrance...

If anyone is willing to home a customer onto their SMDS circuit for a
day, in exchange for various tricks and favors, the noc at netaxs.com folks
would like to know.  SMDS is primarily a backup for them, and 6861 is a 
backup/2ndary POP for netaxs, but there is one customer so far-out that 
they had to use SMDS as a primary point of connection.

Avi






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