Fiber cut in SF area

Sun Apr 12 01:02:02 UTC 2009

Sean Donelan wrote:
> ,,,,
> Uh, not exactly.  There was diversity in this case, but there was also
> N+1 breaks.  Outside of a few counties in the Bay Area, the rest of
> the country's telecommunication system was unaffected.  So in that
> sense the system worked as designed.
> ....

About eight or ten years ago I went to PacBell (or whatever it was
called at the time) and requested that two large facilities get a sonet
ring between them.  I was told I couldn't have it because they were both
fed through a single set of conduits and one backhoe could cut both
sides of the ring.  It wouldn't be diverse so they wouldn't provison it
unless I paid for the digging of new paths.

So much for their theory of diverse.  Sounds like the rules are
different for them.

There are one thing to also point out.  That train track next to the
manholes in South San Jose is the major line between the Bay Area and
Southern CA.  There are at least three or four fiber paths for different
companies buried along those tracks.  There are also connections from
Gilroy to the Hollister/San Juan Bautista area and thence to Salinas.  

It would have been very simple for the telcos to provision a backup path
southward.