North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Fiber cut in SJ

  • From: George William Herbert
  • Date: Fri Aug 05 23:26:59 2005


>> So... is mail not getting in/out from Nanog right now,
>> or is the fairly major fiber cut in San Jose not newsworthy
>> on the operational list anymore....?
>
>I'm gonna guess that people were too distracted with "Oh crap, where'd
>the internet go?"

I couldn't get to outside email from inside for a while.

>So since there's the question, for those not in the know, the word is
>that there was a cut through half of a 1000 strand cable owned by
>Level3, affecting 502 fibers.
>
>It's my understanding that they've been splicing since 23:45 GMT and
>that they're moving through the mass of fibers at an impressive rate.

I have it on good authority (fiber provider, around
5:30 pm pst) that the outage happened in two phases.

First, an electrical contractor backhoed a large fiber
link in downtown San Jose (address deleted due to security
concerns) this morning, causing moderate damage. 

Initial repair efforts apparently went nowhere; there wasn't
enough cable and trench space to work with.

Around 2pm PST the repair lead onsite had the remaining
cable sliced at manhole access points a couple of
hundred meters each direction from the original cut,
to give them clean surfaces and workspace for the
splice.  Which of course took out the other hundreds
of pairs which had survived the initial backhoe.

We certainly didn't get any warning that was going
to happen, and neither did anyone else we were able
to talk to over the course of the afternoon.

I also understand from a couple of fiber providers
that an unusually large amount of other fiber had
been groomed onto that one cable over the last few
years of consolidations.  Eight or nine people I had
talked to thought they had geographically distinct
ring loops that turned out to be on that one cable
when the second cut took it down hard.


-george william herbert
[email protected]