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Re: Bee attack, fiber cut, 7-hour outage

  • From: Jeff Shultz
  • Date: Fri Sep 21 17:04:02 2007

Deepak Jain wrote:



Sean Donelan wrote:


http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/tx/5148125.html

(AUSTIN) Telephone service was out for seven hours in rural Central Texas after bees attacked a construction worker, causing him to jump off his tractor and hit a lever that lowered an auger that sliced a fiber-optic line.



Is this a 7 hour outage a comment on rural Central Texas availability of fiber splicers or novel ways fiber gets cut?

I'm thinking that getting hit by an auger might put the fiber more into the "mangled" category rather than simply cut.

Anytime you talk about "rural" I'm impressed with 7 hours, however -- isn't SONET supposed to make this better?

SONET... yeah, right. We had a fiber-seeking backhoe take out some fiber in the mid-Willamette Valley recently - it took out long distance for several smaller local phone companies for about that long as well. 911 service for at least some people too. I'm interestedly awaiting the final word on what happened there...

Jeff