Fiber Cut in CA?

Tue Feb 2 23:46:13 UTC 2010

On Feb 2, 2010, at 6:36 PM, Bret Clark wrote:

>   Good point...so if the cut is in the middle of nowhere without easy
>   access...then how the hell did it get cut? Malicious?

Some hikers were lost in the desert and tossed down some fiber, waiting for a backhoe to show up and save them, but it was confused by the scent of a much longer, juicier piece....

>   Matt Simmons wrote:
> 
> And in an open desert, back hoes can smell fiber from miles away.
> 
> On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 3:27 PM, Bill Stewart [1]<nonobvious at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 12:04 AM,  [2]<charles at knownelement.com> wrote:
> 
> That is one long protect path. Yikes.
> 
> There be mountains in the way, with deserts in between, and not a lot
> of people to justify diversity or railroads and highways to run it
> along.
> Not many carriers have more than one fiber route across Arizona and
> New Mexico, especially for the newer high-capacity fibers (i.e. built
> this millennium, after the financial excesses of the 90s.)
> I'm no longer current on what routes are being used by what carriers,
> but if you don't have two routes across northern Arizona ( I-10/I-40,
> with restoration routes like Barstow->LasVegas->Flagstaff->Phoenix),
> then the next alternative is Barstow->LasVegas->SaltLakeCity->Denver,
> at which point some carriers have routes down to Phoenix via Tucumcari
> or Amarillo, and the rest are going to go through Dallas, and anybody
> who doesn't have the LasVegas->SLC route is going to use
> Sacramento->SLC->Denver, possibly also including San Jose, depending
> on what routes they've got across California.
> 
> So, yeah, instead of the nice short 2200-mile restoration routes you
> can use if SF->Seattle fails, cable cuts in the Southwest can be
> really long...
> --
> ----
>            Thanks;     Bill
> 
> Note that this isn't my regular email account - It's still experimental so far.
> And Google probably logs and indexes everything you send it.
> 
> References
> 
>   1. mailto:nonobvious at gmail.com
>   2. mailto:charles at knownelement.com
> 

		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb