We will never advance

0patience

We will never be an advanced civilization, because there are too many stupid people that do things like dig up and break fiber optic lines cutting off internet and cell phone service for an entire county. 

If you think about how much internet access contols our lives anymore and to be taken down by one moron digging up a cable, it boggles the mind. 

Funny thing is, only Verizon cell phones aren't affected. Odd.

johnnyB

What you have to remember is that the utility locater is usually the one at fault for mis-marking the location. It's funny how far off their marks always seem to be 

kswildcat

That's if they bother to have utilities located.

webmost

Biggest outage we had was when a tanker truck caught fire inside a tunnel under the river in Baltimore. Melted the fiber optics.

[Deleted User]

I can't tell you how many times this happened when I was on the network team. One time a back hoe took out over head power lines and we lost all of our Mexico offices. I think it averaged twice a year for outages to our Ebterprise networks. 

0patience

You would think that in this age, we could have better infrastructure for utilities. During the monsoon season here, we lose power several times a month because of trees coming down on power lines.
Year after year, it's the same thing.
Fiber optic lines get cut, torn out or broken once every 3 months.

And no one has considered some change?

webmost

We made sure to buy a house where utilities are buried. Only way to go.

[Deleted User]

Just remembered that one of our offices in rural Mississippi had the fiber cable laying in a ditch completely exposed to the elements and anyone who wanted to play with it. It was not a reliable connection as you can imagine. Thanks AT&T for offering to fix it for $30,000.

Another site in Louisiana had the fiber come in from a pole in the ground. The resident cow would back into it or knock it down once a month. I suggested we have a massive BBQ.

Rats love fiber as well. They took out one of our wind farms three times.

kswildcat

Love it when they lay such cables or lines right on top of other lines and you don't know.

Yakster

All these fiber cuts (backhoe fade) help sell more microwave radio links. 

A properly engineered path with 99.999% availability is hard to beat, especially with trenching costs. 

[Deleted User]

Yakster said:

All these fiber cuts (backhoe fade) help sell more microwave radio links. 

A properly engineered path with 99.999% availability is hard to beat, especially with trenching costs. 

True but for the Mexico one I mentioned above, it took out a dual 400mb Microwave link along with some T1's. Someone always finds a way to take gear out. :-)