U.S. Plans Cyber Shield for Utilities, Companies

Thu Jul 8 15:52:38 UTC 2010

In a message written on Thu, Jul 08, 2010 at 08:12:29AM -0700, JC Dill wrote:
> I'm not familiar with cable break splicing procedures, but is it even 
> possible to pay extra to have your splice done first?  I would think 
> that the logistics of splicing are such that the guy down in the hole 
> doesn't know whose traffic is on each strand in the bundle, and his job 
> is just to splice them as he matches them (using color codes or similar 
> on the sheaths of the individual strands) as fast as he can.  Trying to 
> identify a specific strand and then splicing it first would greatly slow 
> down the task of splicing them all.  If you have more than 1 strand that 
> needs to get spliced "first" it would likely take longer to identify 
> these "special" customers and get them done first than to just splice 
> with no priority and get the whole bundle done.

In the simple case of a fiber cut and repair (the proverbial errant
backhoe) you're pretty much correct.  The tech splices the cable
in the obvious to fix order (typically by color code).  I suspect
you could try and be lower in the color code, but in practical terms
once they get going there is not much time difference first to last.

There are more complicated cases though; consider the Baltimore
tunnel fire years ago.  Restoration required running several km of
new fiber on a temporary route, and most importantly troubleshooting
if that did anything bad to anyone (e.g. put them over their distance
budget).  It is entirely possible to be moved to the front of the
"I need help" queue in those situations.

In most cases, if you care about paying lots of money to be first you
have enough money to buy an actually physically diverse route, and it's
a non-issue though....

-- 
       Leo Bicknell - bicknell at ufp.org - CCIE 3440
        PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
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