no safe zone for fiber it seems, bury it and someone will hit when they dig, put it on aerial and someone will hit the damn pole

@staticsafe just leave it on the ground i guess

@staticsafe I mean

the solution is : have multiple fucking paths

@wxcafe @staticsafe system redundancies like the human body!

@uranther @staticsafe @wxcafe I wouldn't have thought such a critical fiber bundle would have been just hanging from poles that close to street level. At least stick it inside a gas line so people will die when they do something that causes it to get cut!

@freakazoid @staticsafe @uranther I mean generally speaking every link is supposed to be redundant, with at least two paths in/out datacenters. it's weird that they didn't double it. Apart from that, having it hang from poles is fine as long as you have another link in case something happens to that first one

@freakazoid @wxcafe @staticsafe Now there''s an idea!

I was thinking something along the lines of a fleet of robo-rats that would auto-respond to the crisis and deploy new fiber in the tunnels and sewers, creating a self-healing telecommunications system 👾

@uranther @staticsafe @wxcafe I would rather have a system that isn't dependent on huge providers with fat pipes and could instead handle a diverse array of connections among a much larger number of smaller entities. Even the fact that TCP and many UDP-based protocols handle out-of-order delivery so badly makes it hard to balance traffic if you don't have very fat pipes.

@freakazoid @wxcafe @staticsafe as in, using every airwave frequency range and protocol available to us, in addition to sneakernet, ethernet, ethernet over power, fricking lasers...

@wxcafe @staticsafe i always feel bad for internet tubes guy, he was trying to speak the truth

@staticsafe an ex of mine said the Internet's natural enemy was the backhoe

@nev its very true

@nev @staticsafe who would win, backbone vs backhoe?

@balrogboogie @nev @staticsafe backhoe always wins

@phessler @balrogboogie @staticsafe never bet against the backhoe

"No Safe Zone for Fiber" a documentary about the folks who have to splice fiber to fix major fibre outages

@staticsafe No Country For Fibre Optics

@nev fuck that's much better

the saga continues, this time in NYC:

[outages] Emergency fiber maintenance New York 111 8th

"Location of Maintenance: 111 8th Ave New York, NY

Reason for Maintenance: Zayo will perform emergency maintenance to repair backbone cable that was damaged recently in a manhole fire. Work will begin at 9pm EDT tonight, 6/29 and continue until work has been completed."

https://puck.nether.net/pipermail/outages/2018-June/011496.html

@staticsafe Oh good. I can take a day off

@staticsafe "manhole fire" are two words you NEVER want to see adjacent

@er1n yeah, it sounds...unpleasant

@jorty @staticsafe JORDYYY

@KitRedgrave it can yeah, though in this case it might have been multiple accidents/incidents of fibre damage

@KitRedgrave decentralize alreadyyyyyy

@modgethanc it kind of is already but it could be more so.

if it was entirely centralized then we'd be 100% screwed forever instead of just inconvenienced while everyone reroutes around the damage