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Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

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Re: Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

#161

Post by patejam »

walrus01 wrote: post #153
patejam wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are massively important fiber lines being hung from a utility pole?

It's more common than you think, a lot of long distance links between cities are a varied combination of aerial, direct buried trenched armored fiber, underground fiber in ducts. There are also a lot of long-distance links carrying DWDM traffic that are >95% aerial, not on poles that can get hit by trucks, with singlemode fiber inside high voltage AC transmission lines ( https://3ee2108sdg.files.wordpress.com/2014/07…

Yeah I understand aerial lines carried by those large towers shown in that image, but utility poles that can get hit by trucks seems problematic. Partly for accidental incidents like a truck crash, but also partly because of how easily it can become an attack vector.

I guess the plus side is that utility pole lines are probably the easiest to fix when cut.

Re: Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

#162

Post by TheCrownedFox »

mattnewton wrote: post #142
TheCrownedFox wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is entirely disingenuous, the United States Constitution explicitly allows the federal government to run a post office (Article 1, Section 8).

Gp is being sarcastic (hence the “socialism uga buga”)

I meant that it's disingenuous to portray small-government proponents like he did by using a strawman of someone upset at a clear government power. It adds nothing to the conversation.

Re: Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

#163

Post by walrus01 »

patejam wrote: post #161
walrus01 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more common than you think, a lot of long distance links between cities are a varied combination of aerial, direct buried trenched armored fiber, underground fiber in ducts. There are also a lot of long-distance links carrying DWDM traffic that are >95% aerial, not on poles that can get hit by trucks, with singlemode fiber inside high voltage AC transmission lines ( https://3ee2108sdg.files.wordpress.com/2014/07…

Yeah I understand aerial lines carried by those large towers shown in that image, but utility poles that can get hit by trucks seems problematic. Partly for accidental incidents like a truck crash, but also partly because of how easily it can become an attack vector. I guess the plus side is that utility pole lines are probably the easiest to fix when cut.

Aerial fiber (ADSS or lashed to strand) is like 1/15th of the cost to build per km compared to underground, 40 inch buried trenched.

A lot of the fiber built during the dotcom 1.0 boom with VC money was trenched along railways or pipeline right of ways.

Re: Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

#164

Post by ra1n85 »

GistNoesis wrote: post #158

I'm picturing plenty of bundled optical fiber cut in two. How big are these bundles ? How can they repair the optical fiber (i.e. how to reconnect each single fiber to its previous half ?) Do they have to reinstall a section of cable ?

They can be sizable depending on the type or how many fibers are run. Marine vs terrestrial are different as well.

Repair depends on the type of cut, too. Aerial run? Buried? Did the fiber get damaged as a result of an underground gas explosion in a nearby vault that caused several meters to fuse together? :)

Often, a splicing is necessary - that involves using special equipment to re-align and fuse the damaged pairs. Slack in the run can be used to bring the damaged ends flush, or a segment can be added to couple them.

Re: Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

#165

Post by dunham »

GistNoesis wrote: post #158

I'm picturing plenty of bundled optical fiber cut in two. How big are these bundles ? How can they repair the optical fiber (i.e. how to reconnect each single fiber to its previous half ?) Do they have to reinstall a section of cable ?

My dad used to do this for AT&T (mainly for train derailments if I remember right). As I understood it, he would cut/polish the ends of the glass and glue together. The process may have changed since then, it’s been about a decade.

Re: Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

#166

Post by patejam »

AngryData wrote: post #159
patejam wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are massively important fiber lines being hung from a utility pole?

I do fiber runs and whenever possible it is strung up on poles. It is far faster and easier than doing underground cabling because there are no utilities or gas lines or what have you to possibly hit. More of the stuff put down 15 years ago was put underground but a lot of it now is just lashed around current telephone lines.

Yeah and for last mile lines it makes complete sense, no problems there. It just seems crazy that a utility pole holds a massively important link between two cities. But I guess that's just how it is.

Re: Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

#167

Post by troydavis »

tomatotomato37 wrote: post #98
JonathonW wrote: post #82

Comcast's confirmed the fiber cut: https://twitter.com/comcastcares/status/1012767042158510080 > One of Comcast’s large backbone network partners had a fiber cut that we believe is also impacting other providers. It is currently affecting our business and residential internet, video and voice customers. We apologize & are working to get services restored as soon as possible They seem to be at least starting to route…

For the infrastructure-level network admins out there, is there different lingo for an intentional and accidental fibre break, or is "fibre cut" used for both? I'm just thinking 'cut' is a pretty intentional word to use here.

“cut” is used for both. Common causes are digging/construction work, maintenance by other carriers sharing the same right-of-way, weather (mostly for aboveground runs and equipment), and occasionally stuff like animals (“squirrel chew”), hunters shooting at things, and equipment failure that doesn’t fail over to redundant gear properly.

Intentional, targeted damage is really rare, even when multiple paths experience concurrent outages. The fact that 2 paths were affected isn’t enough to assume it was intentional.

Re: Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

#168

Post by eric_the_read »

maimeowmeow wrote: post #108
tomcam wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snail mail is handled by one designated quasi-private firm, the USPS. Roads are often handled by contractors on a per-job basis. How would handling it like roads and USPS help?

Internet is more like water, and electric utilities than USPS. Should not have middlemen who incease fees every two years when there is no service improvement. The data these companies charge 50-100 dollars to pass on is way less than 1 cents per average customer. A utility company could easily handle the infrastructure logistics, hiring of workers totalling a bill of 10-30 dollars? https://broadbandnow.com/report/mu…

There's a significant difference, and that is that water and electricity can be meaningfully metered by volume, but Internet can't; that is to say, there is little to no meaningful marginal cost to your ISP for delivering 1GB of data vs 10GB. Bandwidth does have a marginal cost, but by and large data doesn't (yes, peering arrangements, it's more complicated, etc).

Re: Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

#169

Post by peterwwillis »

onewhonknocks wrote: post #105
JonathonW wrote: post #82

Comcast's confirmed the fiber cut: https://twitter.com/comcastcares/status/1012767042158510080 > One of Comcast’s large backbone network partners had a fiber cut that we believe is also impacting other providers. It is currently affecting our business and residential internet, video and voice customers. We apologize & are working to get services restored as soon as possible They seem to be at least starting to route…

Sounds like it was 2 cuts, which likely means it was intentional IMHO: NY| Manhattan| Communication Failure | 30 Rockefeller Plaza (Comast)| Comcast is experiencing a National outage due to 2 fiber line cuts. One between NYC & Chicago, the second between Ashburn & South Carolina. customers urged NOT TO CALL 911, no ETA on a fix, police monitor Edit: source below. Thank you dfee.

Can confirm 2 cuts, L3 to blame apparently.

Re: Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

#170

Post by ryandrake »

nxcho wrote: post #151
reaperducer wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>As a non-American, I find to hard to grasp how a country that places super high priority on access to choices and options can get stuck with just two major parties and just ONE ISP (in most places, that is). Distance. America has states and even counties larger than many countries. And even where there are lots of people, population density is typically less than most other nations. Distance is a killer in last-mile…

Sweden is about the same size as California but with about one third of its population (and about 2/3 of the population density of US), still it is in the top 10 internet access list in about every metric you can think of (together with for example Norway and Iceland, neither especially densely populated) so I don't think the density argument holds.

Also, New Jersey is about as dense as many European countries that have great broadband and competition--yet New Jersey has crappy broadband. So, it's not due to USA's low population density.
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