But you are ignoring the cost of designing, procuring, installing,
monitoring, maintaining such a solution for the THOUSANDS of man holes
and hand holes in even a small fiber network.
The reality is, the types of outages that these things would protect
against (intentional damage to the physical fiber) just don't happen
often enough to warrant the cost. These types of solutions don't
protect against back hoes digging up the fiber, as even if they gave a
few minutes of advanced notice, the average telco can't get someone to
respond to a site in an hour let alone minutes.
On Apr 13, 2009, at 9:05 PM, Peter Beckman wrote:
On Mon, 13 Apr 2009, Shane Ronan wrote:
This all implies that the majority of fiber is in "tunnels" that
can be monitored. In my experience, almost none of it is in tunnels.
In NYC, it's usually buried in conduits directly under the street,
with no access, except through the man holes which are located
about every 500 feet.
In LA, a large amount of the fiber is direct bored under the
streets, with access from hand holes and splice boxes located in
the grassy areas between the street and the side walks.
Along train tracks, the fiber is buried in conduits which are
direct buried in the direct along side the train tracks, with hand
holes every 1000 feet or so.
In any of these scenarios, especially in the third, where the fiber
might run through a rural area with no road access and no cellphone
coverage. Simply walk through the woods to the train tracks, put
open a hand hole and snip, snip, snip, fiber cut.
I'm sure more malicious fiber cuts would result in heightened
security.
If you can put your hand in it, you could put a sensor in it. It
wouldn't
work everywhere, but it could work even in conduit or just simply
inside
access points.
A device the size of your fist or smaller could do the monitoring, and
would fit in most access points I would guess.
You can't protect it all, and obviously you can't put a camera at
every
access point (well, maybe you can). You can't stop a determined
person
from doing anything (like promote networked smart sensors for fiber
runs,
or setting a small explosion inside an access point). And maybe
environmental monitoring of these areas just won't do anything to
help.
But who knows.
Beckman
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Peter Beckman
Internet Guy
beck...@angryox.com http://www.angryox.com/
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