Outside plant protection, fiber cuts, interwebz down oh noes!

Fri Apr 10 20:03:58 UTC 2009

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ravi Pina" <ravi at cow.org>
To: "Charles Wyble" <charles at thewybles.com>
Cc: <nanog at nanog.org>
Sent: Thursday, April 09, 2009 5:41 PM
Subject: Re: Outside plant protection, fiber cuts, interwebz down oh noes!

>> 2) Why didn't an alarm go off that someone had entered the area? It was
>> after business hours, presumably not in response to a trouble ticket,
>> and as such a highly suspicious action. Does it make sense for these
>> access portals to have some sort of alarm? I mean there is fiber running
>> through and as such it could carry the signaling. Would this be a
>> massive cost addition during construction?

I can comment on this, I live three blocks from the scene of the cut.

The manholes themselves sit along railroad tracks and an overpass.  At 2am, 
it's a very dark area, and there is very little traffic at that time.  It 
would be an ideal area to perform this type of vandalism.

On a side note, when I was passing the area this morning at around 10am PDT, 
there were two fiber-trailers working in two separate manholes.

My company (AS4307) fell off the map from about 2am until roughly 10:42pm 
when one of our upstreams (AS20115) finally came back.  Our primary (AS174) 
came back about 11:30pm.  Of course during the majority of the outage, we 
also had no land-lines or cell-phones, so were effectively isolated.

Bobby Glover
Director of Information Services
South Valley Internet 