Cut Optic Line Causes Slow Internet For Many

[TheCableVine]

Channel3000.com (http://www.channel3000.com/news/16356246/detail.html)

A Chicago-area construction crew cut a major fiber optic line along Interstate 94 about 7 a.m. Wednesday, forcing Internet traffic to be re-routed across the Midwest.Business and residential customers of Charter, Berbee, TDS and other providers in Wisconsin, northern Illinois and southeastern Minnesota have been affected.

Many customers experienced Internet slowness and some lost service altogether."Many people don't understand the wires run along the interstates and highway systems, so it looks like crews dug a little too deep," said DeAnne Boegli, TDS public relations manager.

TDS said it can't put an exact number on how many customers were affected, but it said the line was fixed and service was restored Wednesday evening.

Some of the ripple effects from the incident are expected to have an effect nationally.

[yahoo]

:cry:i thought i had it located right........j/j i feel for the excavator!!!!maybe this is his response..............................:escape:

[frostypeters]

TDS got hit? Oh, that's not good... I hope it was marked. Anybody know anything?:yikes:

[TheCableVine]

No. I hate it when they don't include the important information like if it was marked or not.

[Goldenboy]

Madison is just about an hour NW of me. I can't believe I didn't hear anything about this one.

[Goldenboy]

Nevermind it looks like it was cut in Chicago. I thought it was cut in Madison. Here's little more info. Still nothing on the marks.

http://www.madison.com/wsj/topstories/287558

Broken fiber optic cable slows Internet traffic
By Nick Heynen
608-252-6126
nheynen@madison.com
Workers in cubicles across the Midwest actually got some work done Wednesday after an Interstate construction crew near Chicago accidentally cut off Internet traffic to the Chicago hub, causing massive gridlock on the Web.

The cut happened just as people were arriving at work when a crew digging along Interstate 94 near Chicago severed some critical fiber-optic cable in a ditch next to the highway, slowing Internet service throughout much of the Midwest until the early evening.

Traffic ground to near-dial-up speeds starting between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m. on high-speed connections at businesses and homes alike as Internet service providers TDS, Charter Communications and others that use Chicago as an Internet hub tried to reroute traffic to alternate hubs, creating a domino effect that caused some slow-downs across the nation.

DeAnne Boeglie, a TDS spokeswoman, said the company's customers from Minnesota to Tennessee experienced slow Internet connections as a result of the outage. A release from Charter said its customers in Wisconsin, northern Illinois and southeastern Minnesota were having problems as well.

TDS rerouted much of its Internet traffic through hubs in New York, Monticello, Minn., and elsewhere to minimize the effect of the outage, Boeglie said.

To make matters worse, heavy traffic of the vehicular variety prevented repair crews from reaching the site of the broken cables until 11 a.m., Boeglie said. And when they got there, they were faced with unearthing and replacing 2,500 feet of cable along the highway.

"These cables are fiber-optics — which is glass — so when a cut happens it shatters on both ends," she said. "So they have to go back and re-dig the ditch out as far as they can to find a place where they can splice it and reset. So that's going to be 2,500 feet of ditch they are going to dig up."

Handling the repairs were crews from Level 3, the Colorado-based network infrastructure provider that owns the damaged cable. The damaged cable was part of 74,000 miles of fiber-optic cable in 125 cities in North America and Europe owned by the company, according to spokeswoman Kimberly Toulp.

A release from Charter said Internet service was restored to its customers by rerouting traffic to different fiber-optic lines, but normal service wouldn't resume until repairs were completed later in the evening. Boeglie said TDS received word its network was fully restored at 4:45 p.m., though she wasn't sure if the same was true for all service providers that used the damaged cable.

[Wingfoot]

Handling the repairs were crews from Level 3, the Colorado-based network infrastructure provider that owns the damaged cable.
Level 3 stocks on NASDAQ (LVLT) has gone from $132 (http://www.isp-planet.com/news/level3_secure.html) per share high March 2000 to it's low of $1.64 (http://www.lightreading.com/quote.asp?Account=lightreading&Page=QUOTE&Ticker=LVLT) per share summer 2007. Consequently, Level 3 (owned by Bill Gates) has downsized 3 or 4 times on # of locators for it's coast-to-coast fiber line. The locators remaining are the cream of the crop. I would be surprised if the locator was at fault on a Routine ticket; or even a Non Compliance ticket. In the past, a Level 3 locator had to 'Watchdog' any excavation on or around the fibers. Maybe the dumbsizing of Level 3 has taken away 'Watchdogs.' Kinda like saving a nickel to loose a dollar.

The Level 3 locator was the 1st person called when the line went down. "Hey Bud. Your fiber is cut on I-94. Who cut it and where." And the locator knew both answers and who's gonna pay.