Sabotage investigation of fiber cuts in Northwest

Mon Nov 3 03:21:01 UTC 2003

On Sun, Nov 02, 2003 at 09:37:30PM -0500, Robert M. Enger wrote:
> 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...