Can someone please explain what backhoe-proofing is
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 …
COMMENTS
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Tuesday 3rd July 2018 08:35 GMT 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?
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Wednesday 4th July 2018 22:47 GMT tip pc
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.
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Tuesday 3rd July 2018 18:37 GMT 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."
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Wednesday 4th July 2018 03:06 GMT 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.
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Tuesday 3rd July 2018 10:59 GMT 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?