back to article Vodafone drank Facebook's network Kool-Aid … and LIVED!

Vodafone has become the latest carrier to white-box its optical traffic. The trial, which Voda has declared a success, is a handy bit of validation for Facebook, whose Voyager packet-optical switches try and take on one of the toughest segments of networking. “The goal of the live trial was to showcase the future of applying …

  1. RGE_Master

    Can someone please explain what backhoe-proofing is

    1. Kevin Johnston

      If you dig around I am sure you will find the answer

      1. RGE_Master

        I'm not sure I want to be googling that on my office network..... :D

    2. Anonymous Coward
    3. lsces

      Multiple routes?

      Sod's law says the backhoe will hit the cable duct at the point where all of the fibres are in the same one? Perhaps at the top level sites will have two or more independent ducts allowing re-routing around the break, but how much of the infrastructure that feeds us poor end users goes through a single point of failure at several points on the route?

      1. tip pc Silver badge

        Re: Multiple routes?

        “, but how much of the infrastructure that feeds us poor end users goes through a single point of failure at several points on the route?”

        Depends who your ISP is, BT tend to have multiple links per exchange, others including sky tend to have single links as evidenced by recent outages afflicting sky BB recently.

        It’s much cheaper not to bother with redundant links and gamble on being cheaper to pay compensation than provide a highly available solution. IIRC OFCOM require the PSTN to be highly available and I guess BT carried most of that through to BB especially with 21cn being IP first digitising analogue voice and routing it over their networks. It’s likely Sky’s PSTN customers where not impacted during their BB outages due to their partners network failures as they may use other lower bandwidth circuits to route PSTN.

        If you want true redundancy you’ll need to pay for multiple redundant paths. RO2

        Blame OFCOM for insisting on ever cheaper B.B. forcing isp’s To cut costs but cutting availability.

    4. Korev Silver badge

      > Can someone please explain what backhoe-proofing is

      Backhoe is Americanish for the rear digger on a JCB

      1. phuzz Silver badge

        Backhoe is Americanish for the rear digger on a JCB

        They're also known as 'cable finders', because if you're not sure where your fibre connection is buried, the digger putting in an unrelated pipe will almost certainly find it (and destroy it).

    5. FIA Silver badge

      Can someone please explain what backhoe-proofing is

      I could draw you a diagram, but it crosses the line of taste and decency; and may even be illegal in some states. (You watched it! You can't unwatch it!)

    6. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Means watch your vendors

      True story- major airline had dual everything for their main datacenter. Even outgoing data lines from 2 separate vendors. However, they failed to realize that both vendors were renting cable space in the same trench.

      Enter a worker with a backhoe, and you can guess what happened next.

      "What Northwestern officials soon discovered was that their redundant system lines apparently run alongside the lines they are backing up."

      1. Rockets

        Re: Means watch your vendors

        Good data centres will have multiple points of entry for carrier cables & POP rooms for redundancy. When we established our dual data centres we linked them via two dark fibres. We had the carrier supplying the dark fibres provide path diversity into the data centres and the cable paths. Our carrier was able to supply us with maps of the paths our cables took including the entry points to the data centres & results of the fibre test results.

  2. Blockchain commentard

    Any chance that this will improve Vodafone's internet speed or is this just to get the backroom boys excited?

  3. John Sager

    Temporary optical system performance degradation?

    I thought optical fibres, especially in the ground, were fairly proof against the sort of performance degradation that e.g. copper systems suffer from water ingress. So what temporary degradation mechanisms are there, apart from the backhoe-induced total break?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Temporary optical system performance degradation?

      "copper systems suffer from water ingress" So does optical fiber, see: https://www.idacs.uk.com/images/uploads/downloads/Datwyler_WP_Water_Impact_FO_2014.pdf

  4. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    Does this mean that Facebook could actually have a life as a genuine tech business when/if the slurping business model finally gets extinguished ( https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/03/four_federal_agencies_facebook/ )?

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