Re: FCC Hurricane Michael after-action report

[Mike Hammett <nanog () ics-il net>]

The majority of people doing locates are terrible at their job. (Un)fortunately, people doing the conduit installations 
are often terrible at their job as well. It's about a 50/50 split if the line was located correctly and the 
installation crew was careless or the line wasn't located correctly in the first places. Sometimes lines can be off by 
10 feet. 




----- 
Mike Hammett 
Intelligent Computing Solutions 
http://www.ics-il.com 

Midwest-IX 
http://www.midwest-ix.com 

----- Original Message -----

From: "Rich Kulawiec" <rsk () gsp org> 
To: nanog () nanog org 
Sent: Tuesday, May 14, 2019 8:51:13 AM 
Subject: Re: FCC Hurricane Michael after-action report 

On Mon, May 13, 2019 at 11:48:02PM -0500, frnkblk () iname com wrote: 
> One of my takeaways from that article was that burying fiber underground 
> could likely have avoided many/most of these fiber cuts, though I???m 
> not familiar enough with the terrain to know how feasible that is. 

I suspect that may not be possible in (parts of) Florida. 

However, even in places where it's possible, fiber installation is 
sometimes miserably executed. Like my neighborhood. A couple of 
years ago, Verizon decided to finally bring FIOS in. They put in the 
appropriate calls to utility services, who dutifully marked all the 
existing power/cable/gas/etc. lines and then their contractors (or 
sub-sub-contractors) showed up. 

The principle outcome of their efforts quickly became clear, as one 
Comcast cable line after another was severed. Not a handful, not even 
dozens: well over a hundred. They managed to cut mine in three places, 
which was truly impressive. (Thanks for the extended outage, Verizon.) 
After this had gone on for a month, Comcast caught on and took the 
expedient route of just rolling a truck every morning. They'd park at 
the end of the road and just wait for the service calls that they knew 
were coming. Of course Comcast's lines were not the only victims of 
this incompetence and negligence. Amusingly, sometimes Verizon had to 
send its own repair crews for their copper lines. 

There's a lot more but let me skip to the end result. After inflicting 
months of outages on everyone, after tearing up lots of lawns, after all 
of this, many of the fiber conduits that are allegedly underground: aren't. 

---rsk