TELECOM Digest Editor wrote:
>> A fiber got cut by a clumsy contractor with a backhoe early Thursday
>> in Parsons, KS which knocked all of rural s.e. Kansas as served by
>> cableone.net off line. This cut included TELECOM Digest. Right now I
>> am working off of our back up modem dial up line using TerraWorld.
>> Cableone is aware of the problem and they estimate it will be six to
>> eight hours in repair. The contractor just shrugged his shoulders and
>> acted like he did not know what he had done. "He'll shrug his
>> shoulders alright when he gets the repair bill, noted a technician
>> from Cableone.net in Phoenix, AZ where the cableone technical center
>> is located.
I know that shrug. I have my own small company and a few years ago I
watched as the 3 incoming POTS lines went one by one from good to
scratchy to dead, followed by our ISDN line going down.
I went outside and walked across the street where a contractor was
using a Ditch Witch directional drill to install a new conduit for the
phone company. I asked him if he might have just cut any cables.
After a brief "oh shit" look, he responded "no".
He had cut one of those thousand or so pair plastic and copper phone
company cables about the size of your arm. The phone company was
on-site within an hour and worked all night, stringing a cable along
the ground and splicing it around the break at the two manholes
nearest the cut. Everything was back up the next morning. It was at
least 2 months before they pulled the cut cable section out and got
everything back underground.
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: All the internet around here went out
sometime in mid-morning Thursday. Cableone said they first hoped to
have us back in service within 'a few hours', but by later in the
day they were saying they 'hoped to have repairs finished by
nightfall'. After stringing up lots of very bright lights across this
very muddy farmer's field were the cut had occurred then they said
'we hope it will all be repaired sometime tonight' . At 9:55 PM, or
about 12 hours after the fiber cut occurred near Parsons, KS _my_
service at least came back to life when the first four green LEDs on
my cable modem illuminated. The lady in the office here in town over
on Penn Street called me at about 10:30 PM to say 'we are notifying
customers who called us throughout the day to say that service has
been restored. If you do not mind, give it a try for me.' I told her
I had tried it already; was working on the Digest and it all appeared
to be working fine.
A sort of odd event: Using my geo-locating tools and my javascripts,
when I go to those places which identify my whereabouts, I am always
correctly located in Independence, KS (although not on my exact spot
on the map but within a couple blocks); but when I was using my
TerraWorld modem backup line yesterday, the same pages and tools said
I was in 'Ballwin, Missouri' (which is not that far away, about a
hundred miles east and a bit south -- but still). I wish I knew how
those geo-locating tools worked. PAT]
Jim Stewart (jstewart@jkmicro.com)