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Comment by jzer0cool | Hacker News Reader

When houses are created there are building codes to adhere to. For example, when there is a water pipe behind the walls a plumber (a good one) would also put a plate in front of it. In this way, once the walls are in place, drilling away into the wall, or nailing, would hit the metal plate, thus provides some safety mechanism. As another example, underground, in public areas are markings (or at least procedures) to identify such areas gas pipe areas before excavating.

How are the fiber optics being cut? Are there no procedures for this or is there some challenges how the infra is setup today?

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I'm probably the only person reading this thread who owns a backhoe, and it's only a small one. There's really no material that will resist being dug through and is also practical to bury over miles and miles of fiber. There obviously are processes and measures in place to prevent "backhoe-fade" events, including armored cable, tracer wires and tape above the main cable but humans being humans things sometimes don't work out. Contractors can be liable for the cost to spice repairs which will be very costly so they're incented to not cut fibers.

You are not the only person reading this thread who owns a backhoe.

Everything else is 100% correct!

Wondering what the ad targeting AI is making of this thread..

I don't have a backhoe, does an excavator count?

I once hit a gas line. With a jackhammer. 8” below the surface. That should never happen, but did.

I like to joke that the North-American Fiber-Seeking-Backhoe is not, and will never be an endangered species.

Backhoes also can't be blamed for every outage. Cars hitting poles that carry aerial fiber, people ripping up fiber thinking it is copper they can steal, boat anchors at landing sites, etc.

Level 3 at one point stated 17% of all fiber cuts were from squirrels... https://web.archive.org/web/20151213214019/http://blog.level...

One of my favorite network incident reports involved someone using aerial fiber for target practice...

I didn't see your post before mine. I've had circuits down TWICE due to this.

True but generally backbone circuits aren't aerial.

False. It is common for long haul fiber paths to have material portions delivered over aerial runs.

New York is particularly bad for having lots of arial fibre that gets taken down by car crashes or squirrels.

Idiots shooting rifles at aerial fiber...

CAT450 here!

That must be a bulky cable :-)

I thought they were supposed to lay that "cable/pipe/Jimmy Hoffa buried here" warning tape somewhere above the fragile thing that's buried, so if digging you'd catch the tape, see it, and stop?

Used to work for a few ISPs. 90% of the fiber cuts that were experience while I worked there were from municipal construction crews who either weren't fully paying attention when working around fiber lines, or didn't know they were there in the first place.

The lines are supposed to be known/marked to some extent but you can't avoid the human factor.

In our worst case the same city cut the fiber line in multiple places over the course of a few weeks. Our crews would finish patching one fiber break only for the same (city) crew to cut it again a few hours later.

I wasn't on the ground so I don't know exactly how they managed it, but it was a real headache for us to manage on the customer end.

Scale: wrapping all fiber optic cables in a protective metal sheath would be cost prohibitive. Whereas adding a metal sheet to prevent a house from flooding or someone from getting electrocuted makes sense.

One idea, borrowed from some chainsaw safety pants, would be to wrap the cable in a fiber web sheath that tangles in whatever cutting equipment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5VSivQe760

Literally took off the pants testing that! I'm unsure how much is worth getting paid to run a self-test. This product looks pretty neat. Half joking, anyone ever, or witnessed getting eletrocuted trying to get the internet / computer working again?

This spun threads reminds me of nature. Spiders, silk works spinning web. Wonder if that's where the inspiration came from.

TIL that Aramid fibers are not just something made up in bideo games. (: Thanks for sharing that.

Fibre isn’t usually cut by something like a chainsaw but rather by something like a backhoe, rodent’s teeth (squirrels on overhead lines and rats if they run through utility tunnels), or a gunshot. I doubt these super-long chainsaw chaps would even stand up to a determined rodent.

Old Joke: How do you get rescued from a desert island if all you have is some networking gear?

Simple! Bury a network cable and wait for the backhoe to show up.

Backhoes are VERY strong and will easily go through gas pipe let alone anything that might protect fiber. And if the fiber is not where the plans say it is, even calling 811 won't save you.

Even worse is that (here in Canada at least) we have infrastructure surveyed, its GPS coords recorded, then manually entered into CAD (or similar) drawings using a lot of guess work. Things like metal detectors are used to more or less guess that a detected object is in fact a gas line or something, GPS location is recorded, then someone plays connect the dots in CAD. It's unreal. So many opportunities to introduce error, and the initial locating of the underground object could easily be incorrect.

I know newer infrastructure is more diligently recorded, but there is a TON of old crap in the ground ready to be ripped up.

We did some work on the foundation right next to the gas meter which had a pipe going down - which unexpectedly went off direct into the yard to who knows where. They hand dug until they were confident (still took out the power line to the garage. Twice).

The vast majority of fiber optic cuts are someone digging through the cable underground.

You can't realistically prevent this with additional armoring, because it's quite a different failure to someone drilling in the wrong place - the forces are a lot higher, or heavy machinery is involved etc. (see also: the rate at which workers go through water mains in footpaths).

Fiber optics rely on obscurity to remain secure. Not far from my home, there’s at least 2-3 significant fiber optics buried in a trench next to the street in the outskirts of the city, probably 30-40 inches under the ground.

The dig safe people can and do mark them, but people tend to do stupid things.

Some highways have fiber rights of way too. You can see fiber conduit on bridges on the mass pike, for example.

> when there is a water pipe behind the walls a plumber (a good one) would also put a plate in front of it

Where are you located (roughly)? Having assisted in remodeling of 7 homes in the US (IL, WI, CA) built between 1880 and 2005 I haven't seen this.

I've heard of such a thing but never seen it. I was a satellite installer and drilled into a lot of walls. I'd just drill thru the drywall then feel around with a drill bit.

I've never heard of it for plumbing, but kinda in a similar vein most electrical codes require a certain setback for all cabling running through studs and protection where it can't be maintained.

If the cable is passing through a stud less than 1.25" from either face of the stud (giving you ~1.75" once drywall is installed), then a metal plate has to be installed to stop someone trying to hang a picture or shelf or something innocuous up from driving a screw into the cable.

Lots of ways, unfortunately. But generally a quality network will be built to have physical redundancy. Yet, the ISP game at the top is all about cost cutting. So we'll never get what we paid for back in the 90s.

Plates are generally only placed when the pipe or wire is within drywall-screw depth once you add drywall to the studs. They aren't infallible -- For example, they don't protect against carpenters with nailguns patching sheathing on the outside who miss the stud entirely and hit a water pipe instead (you may wonder how I know this..)

As for fiber cuts, one case I'm aware of involved a large diameter concrete drill/hole saw with a diamond-tipped blade. Not much you can do to armor against that.

Liability is pretty good protection -- pretty much everyone that uses heavy equipment to dig is aware of the need to use the "call before you dig" numbers to have someone come out and mark underground utilities.

There's always the person with a rented ditch digger or over confidence "Well I dug out here last year and didn't hit anything, so I can dig again" who doesn't call or notice the trace cable, but overall that service works pretty well at preventing disruptions.

Construction crews need to pay attention to what is below them before they start digging. A backhoe is going to defeat your cable every time.

In a most states, there are blue stake laws requiring you to call and set an appointment to have existing utilities marked with spray paint before you dig. Even though this service is usually free to the contractor, it's sometimes viewed as one more hassle. Usually they didn't plan in advance and so their trying to cut corners to save time.

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