North American Network Operators Group

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Number of cable cuts is down

  • From: Sean Donelan
  • Date: Wed Sep 05 21:52:43 2001

The ATIS Network Reliability Steering Committee met last week
to review last quarters network outages.  I haven't seen what
they've come up with, but last quarter they noted a decreas
in facility outages.

I also noticed an interesting change in Internet-related outages.
The number of cables cuts is down since January 1 2001 compared
with the same time period in 2000 and 1999.

Previously, one of the primary causes of Internet cable cuts was
other carriers' subcontractors installing new fiber in the same
right of ways.  Most high-bandwidth Internet-carriers seem to
use the same right of ways, which aren't identical to the LEC
voice infrastructure.  For example, the Baltimore tunnel fire
had little impact on voice calls, i.e. no carrier filed an FCC
outage report, but the fire's impact showed up on Internet traffic.

With the change in economic climate, many cable projects have been
stopped.  My guess is less carrier work in the same right of ways
means fewer cable cuts.  The number of farmers burying a cow, and
gophers chewing on cable is the same.

There is a silver lining on every cloud....  Those carriers which
have fiber into the ground, are less likely to have cable cuts now.