On the 4th of July it's every American's right to blow up part of his country with recreational explosives. That should take even more of the interweb down!

Why on earth don't they bury those cables ? I never figured out why in the USA everything is still hanging from poles.

Cletus 'Overbite' Hillbilly which's favourite hobby is 'killin thangs' simply couldnt shoot a cable that is buried 6 feet deep .

You Might Be a Red-Neck Nerd If:

You release your networking irritations by takin' out the shotgun and shooting the cable wires.

Calling a network 'bullet proof' is an irresistable challenge to certain categories of yahoo...

What's the chances that the department of homeland insecurity slaps these morons with domestic terrorism charges? It shouldn't be too hard to track em down. Just follow the beer cans to the wrecked pickup.

Closer to home in the UK, there are BT (Openreach) line maintenance folks in various rural parts of the country (where "field sports" are popular) who are frequently having to repair overhead lines which have had shotgun damage... OK it only cuts off a few customers at a time but typically they don't have the option of an alternate route.

"...What's the chances that the department of homeland insecurity slaps these morons with domestic terrorism charges?..."

Somewhere between 'Zero' and 'None.' Idjiits being idjiits isn't terrorism, and never has been - Not even the DHS would try that one on. Slack-jawed idjiits have been blazing away at the infrastructure at random for so long now that it's become an expectation. Heck, many of the various entities even have set-aside budget for such vandalism.

Still doesn't stop it from being damned annoying, though.

thats no worse than a semi automated cable detector called a back hoe

I used to work for a few large telecom equipment providers, and yes, any cabinets intended for the great outdoors had to meet FCC requirements by being, among many other things, bulletproof.

"Hey Billy Bob, betcha can't hit that there brown primer-coated thang.."

In some areas that's not possible to do depending on who owns the land the cable is running over... in my school district where I work in the IT dept., we had to run fiber from poles to get to one of our schools because it had to run over railroad tracks. It took quite some time to get permission from the railroad to do so, since they own the property that the tracks run on. Do ya think they would have let us dig up their tracks to run fiber under it? Not likely...

I understood parts of the US do not bury cables because severe winter weather can make them inaccessible for a few months each year - but then someone told me this in a pub,,,,,

> Why on earth don't they bury those cables ?

I believe their last wishes were to be cremated. Besides, have you priced 1'x1'x3600' coffins recently?

IGMC.

They put the utilities on poles because that way they are safe when the storms come... Oh, wait...

Seriously though, it's almost certainly down to cost, it certainly isn't easier to have them overhead (they need to be replaced more offen, harder to work on, etc.), it doesn't look nice, so it must be cost.

There is the argument that it's hard to route cables under private land, but I don't really buy this as it's the same the world over and in Europe we don't have a problem. Also a former company that I worked for needed two separate fibres run under the M4 near Reading, this wasn't a problem.

Probably a GOP conspiracy and FOX News working together , because neither are happy that all Internet Bloggers are making look like the stupid fools that they are !

that dont always prevent vandalism, he little while ago here in Newfoundland vandals dug up the only fiber crossing the island and had some fun with it, knocking out phone and internet service for over 500 000 people

A lot more than that, it seems. After all, the story made international headlines (in The Register no less).

Fools shouldn't put so much traffic on a single point of failure. They should have alternate routes that traffic will failover to if that one route goes down.

Just like that problem recently when an undersea quake or landslide caused an Asian fiber optic cable to break, and a substantial amount of the far east data traffic couldn't get through and had to be rerouted. But in that case, it's many times more difficult and expensive to run traffic over alternate routes undersea.

"Damned annoying"? hardly.

No doubt that is the reason my Virgin (on the incredulous) cable connection is slower than my dial up connection at work, obviously all their interweb thingy traffic is routed through here.

I always knew the Yanks were to blame somehow :)

utilities put line on over head poles cause its faster and cheaper to initially install and to do maintenance. Now under ground cable;es are better protected fro the weather ,but when you have to do maintenance on them the cost is more You have to dig up, pull the lines, rebury the lines repave . Now in must cities they are requiring lines to be berried.

You know if you trace the route that cogents network takes

it does go through London and that backbone those boneheads

shot is the most likely link west to the stuff located on the west coast

of the US so conceivably it could have made some sites there slower

to respond it's a small interconnected world after all and jack asses

now can mess with you from all over.

As far as I can remember, the internet was designed with one special service in mind - communication should't depend on any "one" link, so that in case rusky nuke ussky, DoD can boast that they know all about it. I guess somene's cuttin' corners in hilbilly country.

"Do ya think they would have let us dig up their tracks to run fiber under it? Not likely..."

Mole plough? - no not a mole plough that makes a slit - but there is equipment that 'tunnels' pipework &c.

AndyD 8-)#

Your poem neither rhymes, nor scans.

Must try harder. :þ

"Now under ground cable;es are better protected fro the weather ,but when you have to do maintenance on them the cost is more You have to dig up, pull the lines, rebury the lines repave "

BT learnt that lesson in the seventies... that's why they are all installed in clever little things called ducts, with access points every so often, that way if there is a fault they can use a TDR (time domain reflectometer) to find out where, open the access hole and pull that section of cable out. That can't be much more difficult than climbing a ladder and pulling a section of wire between poles.

There is also the benefit of when they need to lay more cables, the tunnel is already there and they can use their little pulling device, combined with a compressor and some lube to put a new cable in.

Possibly the single greatest juxtaposition of any two words, ever.

"so that in case rusky nuke ussky, DoD can boast that they know all about it"

Jesus, I just can't believe people are *still* spouting this utter shite. that's like the third time this month just in El Reg's comments section.

Repeat x 100 : "The internet is not ARPANET, ARPANET was not designed to survive a nuclear strike, the internet was not designed to survive a nuclear strike, my head is full of foamy nonsense."

The irony in this story is that the Internet originated in a DARPA experiment to design a wide-area network that could survive a nuclear war. Maybe the affected ISPs should reflect on that, and re-negotiate their peering arrangements so that re-routing happens without the need for human intervention.

"Just like that problem recently when an undersea quake or landslide caused an Asian fiber optic cable to break, and a substantial amount of the far east data traffic couldn't get through and had to be rerouted."

Was that the time when the total spam level for the whole world went down by half? Can we break that cable again?

:P

I think it was someone who has had the wherewithal to take direct action to stop the spam America pukes up between 13:00 & 23:00 GMT.

Good on them

The cables *were* buried...

The live cables were cut--it was the dark spool nearby that was shot-up, ostensibly out of frustration...

http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/business-3/1187860624160480.xml&coll=2

@Frasier:

US isn't Europe, and it's *not* the same - the distances between metro areas are far greater, on average. Yeah, digging cuts down on some kinds of costs, but it greatly raises other kinds of costs - the telecoms and power providers here are quite capable of doing basic maths, and have figured out what costs *them* the least. If it were cheaper here, overall, to bury the lines, they would. In general it isn't, so they don't.

@Acme Fixer:

Yes, damned annoying. Doesn't mean it isn't also expensive, but when you get right down to it, how did the actual damage affect Joe Average? He had to wait a some seconds longer for his grotty pics, or his e-mail might have arrived a bit late, and so on. In the large scheme of things, it's only somewhat above this morning's commute as a topic of conversation. The only reason we're still talking about it still is that it's fibre, instead of stop signs and mailboxes.

@Steven Knox, kain preacher:

:-D

Here is how. My Company uses level 3. any disruption in there service affects our customers to make phone calls

New information (via NANOG):

http://blog.cleveland.com/business/2007/08/vandals_try_to_download_copper.html

Apparently someone first used a chainsaw to cut the fibre, then used a gun to wreck the replacement spool.

Yay, Time Domain Reflectometer. The comms guys at uni loved that one. AKA "a mirror" by people not drowning in jargon...

The Russians laid a communications cable in Atlantic Ocean. A U.S. submarine tapped into it and listened to the Ruskies for months.

If you really want to nothing can stop you.

" "...What's the chances that the department of homeland insecurity slaps these morons with domestic terrorism charges?..."

Somewhere between 'Zero' and 'None.' Idjiits being idjiits isn't terrorism, and never has been - Not even the DHS would try that one on. "

Did they not bring Boston (and elsewhere) to a stand still on the fear of terrorism because someone used flashing lights in a promotional device that did no (and could not) damage to anything?

Perhaps it would be ironic IF IT WERE BASTARD WELL TRUE.

But it isn't.

http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/bl_Charles_Herzfeld.htm

"Why was the ARPAnet started? Most of the early "history" on the subject is wrong. As Director of ARPA at the time, I can tell you our intent. The ARPAnet was not started to create a Command and Control System that would survive a nuclear attack, as many now claim. To build such a system was clearly a major military need, but it was not ARPA's mission to do this; in fact, we would have been severely criticized had we tried. Rather, the ARPAnet came out of our frustration that there were only a limited number of large, powerful research computers in the country, and that many research investigators who should have access to them were geographically separated from them."

m'kay ?

True story, wrong ocean. The cable ran between Sakhalin Island and the mainland, east side of USSR. Details have been published in a popularly available paperback.

@ kain preacher:

More fool you for using only one provider :) Any company that provides services to other's over the internet should be BGP'd for this exact reason.

@kain;

how, precisely does it help cables to "berry" them? Enquiring palates want to know ...

Wasn't that when the local divers tried to obtain copperon the cheap to flog to the scrap merchants?

Chop up and drag uplong lengths of fibre, remove powercable for boosters, tip scrap fibre over side of boat and putt off to sell wire than cost a couple of million to make and lay, for pennies.