Multiple Fiber Cuts In San Francisco Area

georgewilliamherbert writes "Multiple news reports, mailing list posts, blogs, and tweets are pointing out two overnight acts of sabotage in the San Francisco Bay area, with long distance fiber network cables being cut in two locations in the early morning hours. The first cut, around 1:30 AM, affecting landline and cell phone service and 911 calls in the communities of Morgan Hill, Gilroy, and parts of Santa Cruz counties, was on an AT&T fiber alongside Monterey Highway near Blossom Hill Road, in San Jose. A second cut, around 3:30 AM, in San Carlos, affected Sprint fiber and has significantly disrupted services at the 200 Paul datacenter in southern San Francisco. Rumor says that this may be related to a AT&T communications workers contract having just expired — but no evidence has been published yet in the media, and this could be an intentional act of sabotage by someone unrelated to the company's workers."

Why our infrastructure is vulnerable

[Shadow Wrought]

Too mcuh open, ungaurded land. All it takes is a cut sopmewhere along hundreds of miles of cable to wreak havoc.

Re:Why our infrastructure is vulnerable

[GNUbuntu]

All it takes is a cut sopmewhere along hundreds of miles of cable

That would be more probably like millions if not billions of miles of cable that criss-cross the country. And exactly how are you going to remedy that? The fact of the matter is there is neither enough people or resources to protect every inch of those cables.

If this was indeed sabotage....

[Em Emalb]

then I hope whoever did it gets nailed to the wall.

Just because you're unhappy about something doesn't give you the right to go fuck with a bunch of other people.

There's a term for that, it's called being a dickhead.

In general, I hate people.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:Scrappers

[ameyer17]

While fiberoptic cables aren't copper, it's still possible.
People who steal copper don't seem to be intelligent enough to make that distinction.

Re:Multiple cuts as sabatoge

[Anonymous Coward]

which means more than one hence...

Re:Sabotage by a unionized employee?

[je ne sais quoi]

Also, as others have pointed out in this thread, you don't even know the workers did this. They could be framed by the company, or it could be random theft. For example, a while back some houses were burned in Washington state and it was blamed on ecoterrorists, but to me it looked just like insurance fraud. The housing market was tanking and that's a sufficient motive for someone to burn the property and blame someone else. If a contract is being negotiated, AT&T has sufficient motive to make the workers look bad, just as the workers have a motive to make AT&T give them a more favorable contract.

Re:Why our infrastructure is vulnerable

[nine-times]

I don't get it... How would that help Verizon sell you additional services?

Re:This just in

[moniker127]

Or, just some morons with a bit of thermite and a crowbar.

Re:Scrappers

[Anonymous Coward]

fibers dont have any real copper. Not the same thing as the other type of lines.

That's true, but what's important is what someone thinks is inside the cable before opening it. I have heard of an network outage caused by (disappointed) copper thieves cutting through a fiber optic line.

Re:Why our infrastructure is vulnerable

[Deadstick]

I'm entirely willing to attribute the words you bolded to typing, not spelling.

rj

Re:Fiber Lines easy to Find?

[Bourbonium]

Yep, AT&T confirms someone climbed down an unsecured manhole to cut the cable in San Jose and in Gilroy. These things don't accidentally cut themselves, so yeah, I think it was probably someone who knew they could do a lot of damage with very little effort, who knew where the manholes were easily accessible and knew which cables to cut.

Re:Story is a troll?

[SCPRedMage]

Your average copper thief isn't exactly a trained professional. Hell, most of the copper theft around where I live is down by transients who probably don't know a damned thing about cables other than that they can sell them.

Put a length of fiber and a length copper in front of them, don't let them see the ends, and they'll NEVER know the difference.

We need a plague

[Quiet_Desperation]

There's just too many people with nothing to do.

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[account_deleted]

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They are unmistakable differences

[Anonymous Coward]

The very distinct place on the pole where the cable hangs belies what the cable is for.

It is obvious. You must have never looked at utility lines. Copper is on the top for the power.
Down the pole we then have phone (which is antique and mostly deprecated) and then, below that, we have the cable and fiber. There may be many different fibers for different companies. Here we have Comcast, RCN and Verizon. Verizon also does the phone.
The fiber will have 'snow shoes' on it every so often as, unlike copper, it is not easy or trivial to make a splice with fiber. So the extra fiber is wrapped up and put in a bundle which looks like a snow shoe.

A lot of fiber is dark fiber. During the telecom bubble (the dot comm bubble) there was a lot of fiber hanging as it cost less to hang the fiber than the equity that the fiber represented to the banks that were lending money. So for every mile of fiber that was hung the telecom could borrow more than it cost to hang, and they didn't care if the fiber was ever going to be used.

Anyone who has the ability to cut the cable, ie is aware of it, has a bucket truck or ladders, is most likely also smart enough to know the difference. Also, the power goes to a transformer where as the fiber goes to a box on the line near a pole. And the fiber goes to a cable that goes to a box on the house, where as the power goes to a power meter and then to a circuit breaker or fuse box (fuse is old school).

This sounds like union sabotage, really it does.