The first four fiber-optic cables were cut shortly before 1:30 a.m. in an underground vault along Monterey Highway north of Blossom Hill Road in south San Jose, police Sgt. Ronnie Lopez said. The cables belong to AT&T, and most of the service disruption came from this attack.
Four more underground cables, at least two of which belong to AT&T, were cut about two hours later at two locations near each other along Old County Road near Bing Street in San Carlos, authorities said. Two additional lines were sliced on Hayes Avenue in south San Jose.
In each case, the vandals had to pry up heavy manhole covers with a special tool, climb down a shaft and chop through heavy cables. Britton said the four cables cut in San Jose were about the width of a silver dollar and were encased in tough plastic sheath. One cable contained 360 fibers, and the other three had 48 fibers each.
Oh my gosh – now all of these nubes are not going to be able to communicate on facebook
What about twitter
The world will end
Vandalism? One cable is vandalism.
Four cables in four locations is something else.
It may not rise to the term terrorism, but vandalism isn’t the word.
The world won’t end…but hope you didn’t want to call someone or use the bank, just stuff like that. No big deal. I’m sure the bank will accept a chicken and two goats instead of being able to process your paycheck.
I thought at first the story was about some construction equipment accidentally doing this, but now this sounds like a purposeful attack, not some random high school vandalism like kicking over headstones in a cemetery. You would have to know EXACTLY where these lines are and have the tools to get to them. This DOES technical qualify as domestic terrorism in our new world…someone purposefully trying to disrupt regional/national communications.
The Bay Area is filled with all kinds of kooks who could be protesting something and saw this as a way of doing so..
I thought the virtue of the internet was that traffic could be offloaded onto different nodes if need be?
I’d say that this is more reason than ever to lay as much fiber in all directions as possible; not only does it greatly increase the available bandwidth, but it also greatly increases the security of the whole network!
A bunch of punks with bolt cutters shouldn’t be able to isolate entire cities from the internet, as vital as it has become!
Sounds like someone had a major beef with AT&T. I would be looking at disgruntled employees first.
# 5 Li said, “I thought the virtue of the internet was that traffic could be offloaded onto different nodes if need be?”
This pretty much only effected “last mile” traffic. It didn’t isolate an entire city.
I’m willing to bet there’s more to this than the the damage acknowledged. What else did they cut? What other traffic did they interrupt?
Someone has internetophobia, or this is a setup for something bigger……
First reported case of ‘tech’ rage against corporate America.
Anyone want to bet that there is something of great value now missing (theft) in the area affected? This sounds like a great way to disable security alarms and phones over a specific geographic area.
#7 Ah, good to know. Thanks for the information P-O.
My point about more fiber everywhere still stands, though. 🙂
Fiber loops are designed so the terminals are fed from more than one direction, just to avert a loss of signal if one direction is lost. To cut an area would require knowledge of the paths feeding those particular terminals. A telephone office is loaded with terminals being fed and feeding many different paths in an urban environment. This is sabotage.
#7 “This pretty much only effected “last mile” traffic. It didn’t isolate an entire city.”
Not sure why you say that. It completely isolated one entire county Santa Cruz, and parts of Santa Clara and San Benito counties.
Pretty frightening really.
Where do you draw the line of terrorism, if this act was compounded by an apartemnt fire and it was nearly impossible to get the local fire departent the information would it qualify as terrorism then?
whoever did this knew that they were not going to be fried by cutting into some kind of electrical cable. I’d be pretty damned scared to cut into something as thick as a silver dollar without knowing what exactly is going through it.
BTW- I hear that there is a 100K dollar reward to catch these guys.
#12 It seems so. But that begs the question; what was the target? Was a large sum of money or other resources stolen somewhere in the effected area during the outage?
Why?
# 13 FinAddic said, “Not sure why you say that. It completely isolated one entire county Santa Cruz,”
Really? I have family in S.C. They had phone & internet…
All the more reason to go wireless… I mean ‘really go wireless’.
Like straight up.
” #16 Really? I have family in S.C. They had phone & internet…”
I live here. No cell phones, no DSL, dialup or or T1 internet anywhere.
A few folks who had internet via cable tv.
Banks not open. ATM’s not functional. etc etc.
No 911 service county wide.
Local landline service was spotty at best. But calling outside of the county was impossible.
#17 That’s a good point. It’s hard to cut a wireless connection between points A and B without some heavy duty jamming equipment.
#19 I guess it’s because they live in the Southern part of SC County. Must be on a feed that goes to the Salinas AT&T switch.
How on earth do you repair a fiber optic cable?
#22
How on earth do you repair a fiber optic cable?
Put the two ends together lining them up microscopically in a jig, then zap the junction with an arc fusing the two pieces together.
Never mind, I looked it up.
http://fiberoptics4sale.com/Merchant2/fiber-optic-splicing-tutorial.php
#23, (oops) thanks rat_race.
Maybe Osama was taking a swim and he did this just for the kicks?
Funny how one county in California loses their connection for whatever reason, and everyone is suddenly in a panic. ONE county? Gimme a break. This is local news, not national news.
Iv suggested a couple times that the infrastructure of this nation is:
CORPS that wont spend 1 extra penny on ANYTHING.
the backbone to ALL phone/cell/net/and a few other things, ALL RUN on the phone lines.
Phone/POWER/and other NEEDED sources, are ALL based on 40 year old TECH, and 80 year old design.
Wonder why the eastern USA is all on 1 power line?? Not really, but ALMOST.
The internet ISNT a NET, its a ball of LOOSE strings running in every direction, with VERY FEW interconnects between Strings. You could BREAK 1 section and loose 1/4 of the USE to cell/phone/net and emergency services in 1 HIT. If you hit 4-6 locations in the USA you could isolate MAJOR sections of the USA..
# 27 MeAndOnlyMe said, “Funny how one county in California loses their connection for whatever reason, and everyone is suddenly in a panic.”
It wasn’t even the whole county. SC County only has ~50k people…
Interesting comment ECA…
Is it supposed to mean emphasis is being placed with the upper case characters, or does that mean you know what your talking about and in some professional manner you want to assure we understand. After using all that emphasis, what did you say your opinion was? Do you feel something isn’t the way you want it to be, or are you suggesting a way to avoid these problems in the future? Very interesting, yes.