FCC Hurricane Michael after-action report

Tue May 14 13:51:13 UTC 2019

On Mon, May 13, 2019 at 11:48:02PM -0500, frnkblk at iname.com wrote:
> One of my takeaways from that article was that burying fiber underground
> could likely have avoided many/most of these fiber cuts, though I???m
> not familiar enough with the terrain to know how feasible that is.

I suspect that may not be possible in (parts of) Florida.

However, even in places where it's possible, fiber installation is
sometimes miserably executed.  Like my neighborhood.  A couple of
years ago, Verizon decided to finally bring FIOS in.  They put in the
appropriate calls to utility services, who dutifully marked all the
existing power/cable/gas/etc. lines and then their contractors (or
sub-sub-contractors) showed up.

The principle outcome of their efforts quickly became clear, as one
Comcast cable line after another was severed.   Not a handful, not even
dozens: well over a hundred.  They managed to cut mine in three places,
which was truly impressive.  (Thanks for the extended outage, Verizon.)
After this had gone on for a month, Comcast caught on and took the
expedient route of just rolling a truck every morning.  They'd park at
the end of the road and just wait for the service calls that they knew
were coming.  Of course Comcast's lines were not the only victims of
this incompetence and negligence.  Amusingly, sometimes Verizon had to
send its own repair crews for their copper lines.

There's a lot more but let me skip to the end result.  After inflicting
months of outages on everyone, after tearing up lots of lawns, after all
of this, many of the fiber conduits that are allegedly underground: aren't.

---rsk