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Lights are on, but we're still in the dark

K

kenglish

Guest
"Vandals" shut down Comcast to 57,000 Comcast customers in the SLC area this afternoon. Comcast says they should have it running again by midnight. No further details available.
Trying to get any more info is pretty futile.
Even accessing local media sites is a frustrating waste of time.
People are upset that they missed the Jazz game on TV, but feel better since we lost anyway.
The U of U Women's Basketball on the radio sounded like it was sent from Vegas by a pay phone in the hallway.
Maybe we can read what happened in next week's newspaper (we don't have daily printed papers anymore).
Funny, but "Antiquated Modulation 660" KTNN, from the Navaho Nation in Arizona, has been blasting in, in glorious analog, all night. The FCC calls them "unserved', because they don't have high-speed internet, but they seem to do better than us city folks sometimes 🙄 .
 
They are now saying that over 100,000 Comcast customers lost service. Things are still flakey on other services, including cell phones, this morning.
They don't say what actually happened, but the did give an address this morning, which appears to be a flower garden in someone's front yard. Even if they hacked in to a fiber vault, it's hard to believe it caused such widespread damage.
 
From the WHAS-TV website:

"DENVER — Thousands of Comcast customers lost service Tuesday morning after a fiber line near Santa Fe Drive and Evans Avenue was damaged, a spokesperson for Comast said.

About 11,000 customers were affected, Alison Busse said.

She said the line was damaged just before 5 a.m. and that they suspect someone cut the line, thinking it was copper. She said the company reported the incident to the Denver Police Department."

In other words; Copper Theives who thought the lines they were cutting were made out of copper.. What's the best is when they do cut actual copper lines which just happen to be carrying 150kV AC. Cletus gets up the utility pole with his bolt cutters and...POW!
 
Still not sure how a fiber cut in a residential neighborhood could have such a far reaching effect, unless it was a major fiber vault. It's not that close to the headend.
As for people who try to steal copper, karma can be a mother.

I know that local contractors here usually use up a can of red spray paint on every new spool, marking it with, "It's GLASS...not COPPER. No COPPER, no, no!!!"
 
The old WBML site in Macon was torn down, and Cumulus turned in the license, a while back. They couldn't get the transmitter to come up one morning, and went over to find that every inch of copper on the site had been stolen overnight. It wasn't worth starting over.
KSL had copper thieves a few years ago. They thought it would be smart to cut the fence far from the building, but got stuck in the mud driving out with the heavy load. They left the truck, which I think had been stolen.
 
A few years back, there was construction along a major highway where there's 4 lanes of traffic in each direction. The state had temporary concrete barriers and lighting set up for about a 3 mile stretch. Some (bold) copper thieves parked on the berm overnight, disconnected the power to the lights and stole all the cabling they could get their hands on, leaving the highway along that entire construction area in the dark. Bold, I tell ya!
 
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kenglish said:
Still not sure how a fiber cut in a residential neighborhood could have such a far reaching effect, unless it was a major fiber vault. It's not that close to the headend.
Click to expand...
Remember that we're taking about a data network here, not point-to-point. Major multimode fiber trunks or uplinks can run through a sleepy residential neighborhood, or a busy highway.

In a previous gig, a fishing boat dragging anchor snagged an underwater fiber, taking out Internet and land lines to all of the Philippine Islands and huge swaths of the Middle East and North Africa. Literally millions of phone lines and Internet connections were down for almost two weeks.
 
Did you work with undersea cables? I've been fascinated by that stuff for years. Just the thought of looking at the end of a fiber cable, and knowing there's somebody half-a-world away looking at the same thing...wow! The phrase "Cable Landing" gets my heart started. Kinda like DX'ing...there seems to be a romance factor.
 
kenglish said:
Did you work with undersea cables?
Click to expand...
No, but my father did. I was just a customer affected by the fishing boat tearing up the fiber.
My dad used to have an armored fiber optic submarine cable chunk sitting on his desk as a paper weight.
 
Looks like a piece of hose from a gas-station pump, doesn't it? But they are verrrrry long.
 
I've got a great story to write up one day. It's got to do with a major "perfect storm" hurricane, a brilliant scientist, the first telegraph cable between Cuba and the US, a ship dragging its anchor, and a number of almost supernatural elements. I figure it would be a great Halloween piece, and it started with a stranger that was buried in one of our family grave plots, in Pensacola.
 
In a previous gig, a fishing boat dragging anchor snagged an underwater fiber, taking out Internet access and land line telephone circuits to all of the Philippine Islands and huge swaths of the Middle East and North Africa. Literally millions of phone lines and Internet connections were down for almost two weeks.
Click to expand...

You'd think they would have satellite stations in place as a backup in case of cable failure. The latency would be atrocious but it beats being completely disconnected.
 
oldradiotapes said:
You'd think they would have satellite stations in place as a backup in case of cable failure. The latency would be atrocious but it beats being completely disconnected.
Click to expand...
The nice thing about data transport over fiber is the bandwidth-to-cost ratio. Equivalent satellite bandwidth would be ridiculously expensive. Plus a carrier would be paying for that transponder space whether it was used or not. Given the number of outages in a ten year period, keeping all that satellite bandwidth just in case, would be cost prohibitive. All costs that would be passed to the end user.
 
So much international traffic has to be C-Band, and the broadband industry is taking over half of that spectrum. There are companies renting satellite when there are major cable cuts, but it's only as-needed, for the most critical needs.
 
kenglish said:
So much international traffic has to be C-Band, and the broadband industry is taking over half of that spectrum. There are companies renting satellite when there are major cable cuts, but it's only as-needed, for the most critical needs.
Click to expand...
Actually most traffic has moved to KU or KA. Some countries have even banned C-band's use, or are pushing existing C-band users to migrate away within a year. The reason? Same as the U.S.; C-band spectrum is valuable to Cell/PCS provider$.
 
kenglish said:
I've got a great story to write up one day. It's got to do with a major "perfect storm" hurricane, a brilliant scientist, the first telegraph cable between Cuba and the US, ...
Click to expand...
Anything to do with this?

Havana has been cut off from communication with the rest of the world since late Wednesday night, when the Western Union cable operator in Havana ticked the news to Key West that a hurricane was sweeping down the overland wires leading to the cable hut. Immediately afterward the operators at Key West lost Havana, and up to an early hour this morning the Havana cables have remained silent.

Note: do not be alarmed. This happened more than a century ago.
 
DavidEduardo said:
Havana has been cut off from communication with the rest of the world since late Wednesday night, when the Western Union cable operator in Havana ticked the news to Key West that a hurricane was sweeping down the overland wires leading to the cable hut. Immediately afterward the operators at Key West lost Havana, and up to an early hour this morning the Havana cables have remained silent.

Note: do not be alarmed. This happened more than a century ago.
Click to expand...
Indeed. The 'tell' appears to be "Western Union cable operator in Havana."
 
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